I’m interested in ways that people document, prioritize and execute items they need to do. What have you found useful?
For me: I don’t particularly care about other Outlook functionality, but flagging emails and managing them in the sidebar has helped me a lot. I have it set to display only items due today, and then sorted into categories like “now,” “soon,” “pending.” If I don’t expect to get to an item today I change the due date to tomorrow or next week. Items don’t have to be based on an email either, you can just type into the sidebar text field.
When I get emails I either immediately reply, flag it for later action, or ignore, and then I drop all emails into one giant folder. If I need to find something I do it all by search.
I’ve tried other systems like gmail’s to do list, but it feels like way more friction to accomplish the same things, especially wanting to only view tasks due today, and categorizing tasks.
Likewise I’ve tried to-do-list apps, but not being able to instantly convert an email into a task, and not having documentation easily at hand when I go to perform the task makes them feel more burdensome.
For very short-term things, i.e. today or tomorrow, a sticky note on my desktop that goes into recycling the moment it is done. For medium term things, a checklist manager like Google Keep. For longer term or complex things, then project management software like Jira. As another commenter suggested, treat these like a scrum.
For request that I or my team perform for others, it goes into a ticketing system 100%.
to-do.txt
Write them down, then forget about them till the annualish purge of accumulated notes and flags
For task tracking, I setup and used:
It is meant to be the customer facing catch-all for a large entity like a helpdesk. Can automatically convert emails into tasks.
Strictly scheduled stuff goes into calendar, but otherwise I have two text files. The first one I prepare every Monday, listing important things for each day of the week. The other one I do every morning, listing the most important tasks for the day, and a few “nice to have if there’s time”. That’s about it.
Logseq. All my notes and tasks go in there, they link out to other systems if needed.
Did you start with obsidian and migrate? Any experience with obsidian? I’d like to move to logseq, but the interface feels so alien I keep bouncing off it
I didn’t start with obsidian. But what I do is do 99% of my notes in the journal. And just link out to other more detailed notes as needed.
Did you start with obsidian and migrate? Any experience with obsidian? I’d like to move to logseq, but the interface feels so alien I keep bouncing off it
Depends on whether the team I am in uses Scrum or not.
If the team uses Scrum, everything is on the backlog, so rarely do I need personal lists.
If the team doesn’t use Scrum, then I set up my own personal Scrum board. That way, I can deal better with people coming in and saying “hey, snek_boi, this task that I just thought of is urgent and I need you to drop everything you’re doing and do this now”. With the Scrum board, I can then ask them if what they need me to do is more important than whatever’s on top of my personal backlog, and often they themselves realize their ‘urgent’ task is actually not that urgent.
Since you asked about software, I’ve used Taiga and Notion.
Also, I used to do GTD religiously, but now I mainly use Scrum because it forces me to ruthlessly prioritize. Since you asked about apps, I’ll tell you that when I did GTD, I used Joplin with Syncthing (or some combination of Syncthing and a local notes app). I switched to StandardNotes before stopping doing GTD altogether. Maybe I’ll come back to GTD in the future.
I also almost started Bullet Journaling, buying the journal and all, but a friend of mine was quite depressed and seemed to need it more so I gave it all to him.
If there is no ticket there is no task. That is company policy and anyone trying to skirt it gets a discussion with their manager.
As much as I hate Service Now it does a good job of tracking everything assigned to your name.
Tickets are primarily inbound right? Do you deal much with tasks that are generated by you or your team, rather than coming from somewhere external?
Everything is a ticket. Backups failing? Ticket. Device rebooted? Ticket. Device needs patching? you guessed it, ticket.
My job is pretty chill, so I only have a todo.txt on my desktop
Same, we use notion but no one really follows up on it so similar vibe.
Ticket system.
Not there, (usually) not my task.
Except for my superior and I’ll usually try to make him to create a ticket.I started writing all of my todo items on my Friday calendar. If i put them on Monday, Tuesday, etc., they just get left in the dust at the end of the day. Now i know to check Friday whenever i have spare time. Whatever doesn’t get done gets moved to next Friday.
Jira.
Personal to-do lists, a two-tier todo.txt process.
I have One Big Todo list, into which everything goes, with (at the least) added date and priority. At any job, this list becomes unmanageable and overwhelming within a couple of months, so I use the Executive List process a the second tier. It’s the critical part that makes the rest work.
I create a new executive list every morning; it’s a list of things from my main list that I think I could accomplish that day. It is always larger than I have time for: the important thing about “could do today” is that it’s things that I’m able to complete - I have everything I need to do - not whether I necessarily have time. But the list is reasonable; it’s not hugely more stuff than I can accomplish, it’s just that I know I won’t complete everything. As I check things off, they’re also checked off the big list. New things only go in the big list first, although they might also get added to the executive list.
The EL is psychological:
- It’s manageable. It’s not a overwhelming, like the Big List of Everything I Need to Do is. It’s easier to face.
- I know I won’t complete everything, because I’ve intentionally overloaded it so that I can’t. This removes the stress to “do everything” on the list.
- It is trashed at the end of the day, and the first thing I do the next day is create a new list from scratch. This further removes stress about the importance of the list.
The big list only ever gets bigger. Once a month, quarter, or year I go through the big list and delete (well, archive) everything that’s OBE. But the nature of management is that there’s always more than you can do, and much of it isn’t really important, but you can’t determine this in the moment. This is like going into Jira and deleting tickets over two years old, or whatever similar progress your team uses.
The EL lets you prioritize accomplishable tasks for the day; it’s ephemeral, and surmountable. It’s also a way to break down bigger tasks from the Big List into bite-size chunks; the BL may have “resolve issue requiring scheduled server reboots”, and you might put “talk to OPs about sending nightly logs to dev team” on the EL.
I used to just fill journals with pages and pages of to-do lists. It was worse than useless. Even moving it to todo.txt was a partial solution, because while it was easier to query, the list still became overwhelming. I dreaded looking all that list. The EL changed all that. I start the day looking at the BL, poking at it, pulling some things out into the EL for the day, maybe deleting some OBE items, but it’s low key. Once I get a half dozen or dozen things in the EL, I stop, and start working on those items.
Throw it away at the end of the day, though - completed or not. If you’re completing everything, add more stuff tomorrow; you should always have something to throw away, to reinforce that you’re not trying to do everything. Don’t carry the EL forward, or it just becomes another BL.
Some scripts really help, here. Copying things from BL to EL; completing things in the BL that were completed in the EL. It’s not necessary, but it makes things easier. This is why I use todo.txt - it’s plain text, and easily manipulatable with standard Unix text processing tools, and so easy to script.
Thanks for sharing. Interesting, the idea of a big list and then a “doing today list” lines up with a “time management for dummies” book I found in a drawer at one of my first jobs. For a while I was using that system but written by hand.
I only wish I’d evolved it much earlier.
For most of my career, I haven’t really needed it. I was a computer programmer for ages, and there were no to-do lists, aside from natural ones that fall out from trying to get from here to there. It was moving to management that really exposed my need for a process.
todo.txt isn’t so much of a process as a data format, but it worked. The big evolution came with executive lists, which I read about on Lemmy of all places. I believe EL doesn’t really cover more than the EL itself; combining them was my innovation, although I’m certain I’m not the first to come up with it. I can’t imagine effectively doing it on paper.
As of late, calendar for meetings, memory for todos. If I can’t remember it, it wasn’t that important. If it was that important, someone will call asking about it. I’ve delivered too many “urgent reports” that sat unread for weeks, if at all.
That’s an interesting philosophy. You haven’t had people annoyed that you didn’t follow up on something they’ve asked about? I guess my memory at least isn’t good enough to track everything I need to do. Or maybe I could remember but feels like more work/risk than having an external system. I also primarily deal with customer facing stuff so maybe I’d feel different than if I was only dealing with coworkers.
I also mostly deal with customer facing tasks, my calendar is 80% filled with meetings. If I need to prepare something important, it needs to have a calendar blocker otherwise I won’t physically have time for it. If I can do it immediately (send some email, provide some existing report or documentation, I do it immediately and arrive 3 min late for the next meeting).
If something slips through the cracks I apologize and say “I was busy with x, Y and z, haven’t found time for it yet”. Helps to have “fuck you” seniority I guess, I wouldn’t have dared doing that 10 years ago.
A few years ago speaking to a VP he told me every week he empties his inbox. Not in a GTD way, just mark all as read. Rationale: “if something is important they will call me”. Email and slack are best-effort channels for me since then.
I have two .TXT files for non-urgent tasks:
- Remote Work
- On-Site Work (everything involving something physical, basically)
I don’t use apps except Google/Outlook calendar for urgent/time-specific tasks. I immediately make an empty draft for each email that I must reply to or otherwise do something with, which I then review during any downtime; I try to keep my inbox’s unread count at zero the majority of the time (during working hrs, anyway). To me, flagging is pointless if you’re gonna respond anyway; you may as well start that process with a draft and then review your drafts. I work through drafts from the oldest to the newest.
With that said, I don’t use due dates, either, and get away with just calendaring.
