When you are a translator, your work is more or less linear (which is one of the great things about translation). As you progress to a #translapreneur, a lot of additional tasks pop up, with often unclear priorities and urgencies.

For a translator, it can be depressing to switch from the boolean mode of “work/no work” to the plethora of options you get once you have to deal with direct clients, social media, emails, and so on.

It was for me. I cannot say that I have found the solution to this problem — quite on the contrary, I’m still struggling to manage my tasks in a way that doesn’t lead me to zeitnots and missed deadlines.

As a kinesthetic type, I feel that my ongoing failures have a lot to do with the fact that I cannot “feel” the tasks at hand (see, I even use “manual” idioms). That’s why I thought that I should give up the comfort of my Macbook for a while and switch to some good ol’ paper.

I’m a fan of board games, so I turned each task into a card with a fancy pic (given my appalling drawing skills), a short description, and a set of numerical parameters such as urgency, fun, importance, and time (UFIT, if you wish). Here’s what came out:

Now I have to design the rules to use these cards 🙂

For now I’ll be just drawing them from the “deck” one by one and figuring out if it’s something I want to do in that moment. I’ll see how or if it works and will keep you posted!

What about you? What VARK type are you, and what task management hacks do you use?