Quickly Prioritize Notes with Color-coded Shorties

I’m a stationery nerd. I can’t resist poring over the shelves of office supply stores for unusual items that might fit a tricky niche in my productivity lifestyle.

Occasionally I strike gold. For instance, this weekend I discovered Pacon’s exellent blank tagboard flash cards. They come in boxes of 1,000 in an assortment of 5 colors. Each flash card is 3” x 2”.

The cards are designed for study purposes, but for a productivity nerd they suggest a variety of other interesting uses. Smaller than index cards, they lend themselves to a single thought, task, or other concrete item each.

On the drive back from a weekend spent out of town, I pondered various ways to take advantage of my nifty new cards (which I’ve nicknamed “shorties”). I came up with a few possibilities, but here’s my favorite.

The Vicious Index Card Cycle

As I’ve mentioned before, I carry a “pocket briefcase” loaded with index cards for taking notes on the go. Here’s the index card routine:

1. Sit at my desk, eager to tackle a long list of tasks.
2. Get called away to the first meeting of the day.
3. Race around the office from meeting to meeting, scribbling down solutions to existing problems, tasks I may or may not have on my list, ideas for new projects, etc.
4. Return to my desk with four or five index cards densely filled front and back with indecipherable notes.
5. Spend forty minutes processing the cards into my to-do list (sticking to David Allen’s 2-Minute Rule).
6. Sit back, sigh with relief, and immediately get called away to another meeting, or a lunch, etc.
7. Rinse and repeat as my task list grows monstrously large and nothing actually gets done.

The Needles in the Haystack

You might suggest that I tackle a major task before worrying about the cards. Problem is, I’ll have written down 1 or 2 important, time-sensitive tasks—somewhere—so I’ll need to process everything to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything.

Shorties provide a handy solution to this dilemma. Keep 3 colors of shorties in a business card case or snug in a rubberband. I’m starting off with green, red, and yellow:

• Tasks to process immediately on returning to my desk.
• Tasks to process before the end of the work day.
• Tasks to leave for my Weekly Review.

One task per shorty. I reserve index cards only for project ideas, extended notes, anything that won’t lead to a concrete to-do.

Now I can return to my desk, process the time-sensitive tasks, and get to work as soon as possible, saving bigger stuff for when there’s time.

To get your own shorties, go to Amazon or plug your zip code in here to find the nearest Pacon dealer.