Are You Worrying About Remaining Work?

The Miller paper on short-term memory described what people typically can not hold more than nine things to think at any one time. To work effectively these nine cells must be available for current tasks. Usually many of us are using this critical resource for remembering work remains for next hours, next days and even weeks. This tendency slows down the work. Remaining tasks are filling the short-term memory concurrently push-outing each other.

"My work is about developing and supporting web sites for few our customers. Usually they are contacting me suddenly and asking me to do something. Switching to these "five minute" tasks can shoot all time for my primary work. But if I decided to defer such tasks, I usually forget about most of them until customer asked me about it again. Rather better, I can't think about anything other than these tasks." – said Anna Zayda, professional web developer from PMbrain.com.

Well known technique to avoid worrying about remaining work is writing tasks on scratches of paper or sticky notes. But usually this leads to holding information about place where task was written, still utilizing the short-term memory.

Alternatively tasks can be stored in the to-do list software. There are many interesting shareware and freeware tools. To avoid worrying about non complete tasks, do the job effectively and sequentially only few simple steps can be performed on a regular daily basis using any of them:
1) Add a task to the list then it comes from your mind, customer or boss.
2) Plan it to available time of a day.
3) Mark tasks as completed when it actually done.

With a new release of DevPlanner even more techniques are easily accessible:
4) Move incomplete tasks to the next day.
5) Remove all obsolete tasks from the list if you even did not start it.
6) Print a report of completed tasks for a week.

DevPlanner is a shareware program and available for 30 days free at http://www.devplanner.com or http://www.devplanner.org.

About Fedorenko Company
Fedorenko is an independent innovative software development company. Our competences are time management, project management and productivity tools and technologies.