I forgot to share my repeating maintenance tasks with you!

Yesterday, I wrote about my morning routine. It helps me clear my mind and to surface my anxieties. I feel a lot better afterwards – less clouded, less sub-consciously driven.

Part of that routine is a daily review. It’s a daily recurring project:

I adopted this habit from Sven Fechner at SimplicityBliss.com. He customized the project further: on some weekdays, Daily Review A would show up, while on others he gets Daily Review B. I don’t need that much customization now so I stick to a single project, recurring from Monday through Saturday. (Sunday’s off.)

It took quite a while to come up with a handy solution to have an overview of my short- to mid-term goals. I simply drew a Mind-Map, digitally, to have it with me at all times and truly look at the goals every day, first thing in the morning.

I don’t feel comfortable sharing all of them with you just yet. Some goals are very personal, and we don’t know each other very long, so let’s not rush things here. But here’s a selection of some of my goals so you get a picture and maybe have less of a hard time finding out what to take into account:

This helps me prioritize picking the most important tasks of the day, my W.I.P., or “work in progress”.

W.I.P. is a set of actions I can easily complete in the course of a day. When a task is finished, another one can fill its slot. W.I.P. is limited to 3–5 items usually, so you have to be picky first, but then you’ll find it’s easier to focus on the pre-selection of tasks later.

By the way, Personal Kanban is a very inspirational book for personal productivity. Kanban is a great tool to get organized as a team and as a self-motivated, creative person, and this particular book makes the principles easy to comprehend. I’ll probably do a post on Kanban in the future.

So goals help me motivate myself and focus on certain things in life while not forgetting about the worldly things.

I’d love to see what Sven Fechner actually looks at, or how you’d implement this process. I’m sure this is not the last thing I’ll have to say about this. I refine the process with further iterations. Inspiration is very welcome, so be invited to share your solutions!