K, so it’s now 3:14 in the morning, and I finally finally managed to get a tech support representative at my hosting company who knew what was going on with my blogging problems.

He said that Blogger has changed the port numbers it uses to publish posts. My hosting company can fix the problem, but I have to be able to get the new port numbers from Blogger first.

Fat chance.

There’s no way that I’m going to be able to get that information easily, let alone quickly. And the tech support rep. said that it was IP-address specific, so as soon as my blog gets assigned to a different Blogger server, I’m toast again.

I think I may need to move my blog. Again.

This time I’m going with something that’s hosted on my server. Wordpress Ho! This web page is now under construction, and it’s going to have to wait until school is over Monday. Please hang in there valued readers!

You’ll notice that there are some things different about this post. First of all, it doesn’t follow the format of any of my other posts. You’ll also notice that I skipped Entry 37. Let me explain.

Finals

I’m finishing up my second-to-last semester at BYU, and the last two weeks of school have been rough. Most of my professors cancelled their finals and assigned really big projects and papers instead. So I have a lot of work and an earlier Christmas break. I’ve been very busy, so my poor blog has been suffering.

Murphy’s Law

Because I have been so busy, my blog decided it was the perfect time to break. I have been trying for days to make a post I wrote 4 days ago (on a good, different topic), but I just can’t seem to get my software up again. I have been using Blogger, but it keeps timing out when I try to connect to my hosting through FTP. My normal FTP program works just fine, but Blogger and my hosting aren’t playing nice.

This means, unfortunately, that I will have to make posts manually for a few days until I can sort everything out. I can’t wait to have comments again! Oh, and I promise that Entry 37 will show up eventually.

One of the hardest things to do in life is to make sure your priorities are in order—to make sure that you are doing or valuing what is truly the most important.

Keeping priorities in order is tricky because of three things: awareness, variance, and laziness. You can’t always remember everything, things change, and you have to just plain get up and do it.

If you can master the skill of keeping your priorities straight—or, in a work/project environment, task management—productivity, monetary, and job satisfaction rewards await.

Remember the Milk

Remember the Milk is an online task management system (similar to Basecamp) that I have been trying for the last few weeks. There are a lot of task managers out there, and you should simply find one that works for you. Here is how mine has helped me to overcome the three problems of priority and task management:

Awareness

Remember the Milk allows me to capture all of the things I need to do and sort them into categories, deadlines, and priority levels. I can create tasks that are parts of a larger task (I would call them subtasks, but that would make it seem like the software does more than it really does—I keep track of the tasks and subtasks manually). I just enter my tasks in one at a time and voila! Remember the Milk sorts them all and then retrieves the tasks that are relevant to me at the current moment.

Variance

Remember the Milk allows me to move my tasks between categories, change dates and priority levels, delete tasks, establish repeating tasks, and estimate the time required for each task. The flexibility helps me keep up with all the changes going on.

Laziness

I’m still on my own here, except that I feel more motivated because I can see the end of my task list, I’m checking things off the list, and I know I’m not missing anything.

Here’s a screenshot:

Click to Enlarge

I have certainly seen a jump in my productivity since I started using the Remember the Milk task manager. I recommend it, or at least something similar, for helping you to increase your (and your group’s—share tasks with colleagues) productivity.

How do you manage your tasks?