The leading experts, neuroscientists and psychologists agree there are 6 factors that influence how well we manage our personal tasks. How does Personizer stack up to these key factors?

 

These steps can be summarized with the acronym: FASTER.

Filtration – defer, delegate, delay or do it. (won’t do it, you do it, later or now).

Actionable and specific – so you know exactly what it is and when it’s done.

Scope – who will be affected , why am i doing this? what are the motivators? To whom am i accountable? Awareness of the smaller and bigger picture of this task.

Triage – apply prioritization compared to your other tasks. How important and critical is it? If this task was a patient in emergency dept, when would it be seen?

Ending in site – have a deadline and schedule the task.

Review and look for ways to improve.

 

The Personizer system satisfies these 6 key principles critical to personal organizing.

 

Filtration: Every time you have an important idea, or email, or information comes in requiring an action, filter it down into a specific task and throw it in the app. The Personizer  app can also receive new tasks from any other apps that have the Share to feature, such as email app or web browser apps. For example while reading your emails, highlight a piece of text, tap “Share to”, tap Personizer , and now a new task is born. This also works from a web browser, or any app where you can select text and ‘share to’, just follow the same steps.

Action and specification:
Be specific and clear and break the task into bite size pieces wherever possible. Ask the question what is the next action step to completing the objective?

 

Each task in Personizer has an optional Text information area (note area). Make the subject short, and fill up the text info with as much detail as is needed to make the decision to action simpler. When you find yourself acquiring too much information on a task, that usually means it’s time to copy into your dedicated notes program. Notes are for reference, whereas a Task(todo) is for action.  In future we will build in a dedicated notes storage area as well.

Scope:
As the tasks are categorized by Person, we are already including a massive wealth of person information into that task. Why? Because when we think of a person, we think of our relationship; who they are, and what our interaction and purpose is with them.

 

Categorizing a task by person means all other current tasks associated with this contact are now grouped together. Providing more context to each task and how it might relate to another task. Previous tasks that were categorized with that person can also be looked up via the History section (or just tap the “…” button next to the Contact and view Previous tasks).

Now there’s a great reason to make use of your Contacts photo field. We keep photos of our loved ones on our fridge or our desk, to remind us of them. So seeing the person’s photo while organizing and working on a task that involves them will also help us stay motivated. We don’t even have to read their name, we can see who it is for!

Triage / Prioritization:

As the tasks are now categorized by each person we can grasp the bigger picture, thereby making the decision of prioritization much easier. Or how important is this client/contact to me?

If this task was in an emergency hospital when would it get seen? Urgently or not so urgent.
Drag the tasks into the order you want to do them.

 

Or set very important tasks to always show at the top.

Ending – Deadlines:

 

The workflow in a person centric system is:
Person -> Task -> (optional) Calendar /  alarm.

Set alarm reminders for each task. These will pop up to remind you at specified times. The tasks with reminders will show a little alarm clock icon next to them.

Set calendar events and have it linked to that Task. A calendar icon will appear next to the task, and tapping it will jump straight to the calendar appointment in your existing default calendar.

So if you add the task onto the calendar, but it must be done through Personizer, it will add it to your default Google calendar, and appear on all your other device calendars. This makes it easy to adjust the meeting time in future; simply think of the person, now the task, now tap the calendar icon – and presto we are right where we need to be in the calendar event.

No more scrolling through calendars looking for when that meeting was booked. Everything is contextual, everything flows naturally. But to organize by time, we also need to view a schedule. That’s easy, tap the Table view mode, and now we can see all our deadlines, reminders, and tasks and grouped persons. Filter them to just show what’s on today. Tap any column header to sort by it. E.g. Tap the Calendar column to see the next upcoming appointments in chronological order.

 

The color code system used is based on simple traffic lights.

When a task was due yesterday but wasn’t completed, it will turn red.

When a task is due today it will turn yellow.

When a task is due in the future or has no deadline set it will remain green.

 

Those color timeframes are based on either the Calendar or the Alarm that was set. Remember the Calendar entry must be created from Personizer via the Task so that personizer knows about it.

 

The filter drop-down lets you show tasks from Today, Today & Overdue or All tasks.

Today is defined as Midnight to midnight. Overdue is defined as yesterday from midnight earlier.

 

Review:

Follow up by viewing the Tasks Done screen, and see your progress. We are adding a new feature, that will give a summary of the number of new tasks created, and the number of tasks completed. We have more exciting reporting features coming – stay tuned!

 

For now use the filters in the History page to show what was completed.

 

This process of personal organization leads to impressive leveraged personal development.

Grab a free copy of Personizer now from the Playstore.