There are certain projects which will reappear for me. This could be cleaning the house, promoting a blog post, preparing for an event, or many more activities from a whole host of different areas in my life.
Some of these aren’t that important so if I miss a step it doesn’t really matter that much. But others include easy to vital steps that if forgotten can have dramatic or serious repercussions.
I was reminded of this when I saw an article about How to promote a Hangout On Air for Google Plus. Most of the steps were obvious and the sort of thing most people could think of if you really pushed them to, but just because you can think of them in a free moment doesn’t mean that you would think of them when you are actually organising your hangout on air. I know that one of the best ways to insure you do every action within a project is to use a checklist. Checklist prevent you from missing a step because you can see it in front of you. They can help standardise a procedure so you don’t have to think about what you need to do, you can just follow the steps which you designed.
The only issue is that it can be a pain to type out a series of checklists again and again. Or have a separate place that you have to go to in order to see your checklist. It would be much better to simply see a checklist in your project manager which you could incorporate with your usually schedule. The only issue is finding a great way to add a series of regular tasks, quickly, into a project manager
Step in TextExpander
TextExpander lets you type a small abbreviation (for example ;hoachecklist ) and then have it expand into a larger piece of text, picture or even script. You can even set up fill in text boxes so you can make mail merge messages for regular messages which you send. Critically for you and I, we can set it up to add repeating tasks to a todo list.
All you need to do is create your abbreviation (such as ;hoachecklist ) and then start typing out each item for your checklist with %key:enter% at the end of each task. This will tell your keyboard to press enter (the most common way to submit a new task).
Not Perfect
There are some limitation, after all, you can only add the name for your task so you can add in any contexts or other features which you might want to add to your task, but if you are using Wunderlist, you can add #hashtags to denote the context. Plus you should always remember to review the actions, after all your checklist might not be right for this occasion and you might want to add in additional actions. However, this system does provide you with a good foundation which you can then adapt later on.
Also, if you do these actions every week/month then you can just set up repeating tasks in most task management systems. These will let you set up the contexts for every task as well as more fine tuned controls like due dates and reminders, saving you more time. As such, TextExpander is better used when the tasks are semi regular or irregular.
Using this for Your Church
Are there certain regular or semi regular checklists you need to go through?
Maybe you have a church cleaning checklist, or a procedure when you invite a guest to your church?
Perhaps you need to assign different tasks to different people from week to week, this is a great way round that.
Eric Dye says
Written like a true app pro. 😛