One of the common traits of the successful people in any field is they keep to-do lists. They approach the day with a pre-defined list of tasks which relate to personal and professional goals. They are able to access supporting information easily. While the day brings its share of interruptions and new opportunities, that list drives the day.

What makes this age different is the amount of information arriving digitally. What makes this age difficult is the lack of a system to handle it.

• How many emails sit in Inboxes for days or weeks because they serve as quasi-reminders of things that need to be done?
• How many of our tasks have supporting material associated with them in some digital location?

Digital challenges require digital solutions.

• What if you could look at the phone you have with you this moment and see a list of the next half-dozen tasks you need to do?
• What if every commitment you have made to yourself or someone else was in that one list, sorted by date, and easily searchable?
• What if you could take all of those tasks which recur weekly, monthly, or annually and put them on autopilot? Do the task, check it off, watch it disappear, and watch it re-appear when it needs to be done again.
• What if all of the emails which sit for weeks in the Inbox could be easily forwarded to the to-do list, where they re-appear on the correct day, worded in the most helpful way, and with the supporting material attached.
• What if the next time you acquired a to-do, you could speak it into your phone, and have your speech transcribed to text and entered on your to-do list?

If you are attending the Mississippi Educational Computing Associating Conference (MECA) this coming week, join me for Supercharge Your Productivity: A Digital To-Do List That Works. The people who attend this session will leave with everything just listed, and have it for free.

As I survey participants in live workshops, smartphones are ubiquitous. Moreover, half of attendees say their calendar lives on their phone. Most respond that their contacts, complete with physical addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers, also reside on their phone and sync with their other devices.

Ask where their to-do list resides, and the story is different. Of the few who claim to have a “digital to-do list,” some are trying to cram their to-dos onto their calendars. Others try to use a “notepad” app, the digital equivalent of a sticky note on computer monitor. Ask them how they handle repeating tasks or how they keep supporting material, and they begin to realize their systems has more holes than Swiss cheese.

So much of the overwhelm teachers feel isn’t so much about what has to be done, but lack of a way to organize it all. That changes in this session at MECA 2015.