Fasting month of Ramadhan has done a lot of good for me in a practical sense. For one, I've rearranged my sleeping schedule to start the day at 5am. I kept trying last month, but it didn't seem to stick. Now I can get up at that time without needing an alarm clock. I love the Nike Awake ad. Someone told me they didn't get it. Basically at the end it's the alarm buzzer going off after showing what all the different people do to start the day at the crack of dawn before you wake up. Switch sahur with a proper large breakfast to start the day and it's all good.

Fasting is also tiring. This makes me depend even more on my organizer to keep things in focus. If you're tired you let one thing slip, then the next.. and to catch up you get tired, let more things slip and the cycle repeats. True enough, I got a lot of overdue things done and also started new projects.

I've written before about prioritising tasks. In that article I didn't use urgency yet. While I'm aware of what priority items are each day, they were not attended to efficiently. A lot of small simple tasks were therefore building up, when they should be cleared first thing in the morning since they take up so little time. This resulted in a lot of priority 1's and a lot of priority 2's left undone and building up as they were never attended to even though they were trivial.

Now I also assign urgency (A,B,C,D) to tasks, on which should be done first, even to priority 2's. Now I have a second level of prioritization that allows me to more efficiently deal with tasks building up. I use them as:

A - quick task, just do it now if it's priority 1, do it quickly first for priority 2 if you find an idle moment

B - this is going to take a bit more time, probably will need to be bumped up as priority 1 and dealt with properly

I don't use C or D, too fine grained for me. For these, I leave it as priority 3 tasks.