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.
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.
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.
Planner for long term projects.
Emails stay unread till dealt with in Outlook, same with Teams.
Calendar events for day and time specific things/meetings.
Sticky notes for day to day tasks so I can cross them off. Going all digital just sucks. I like crossing things physically off a list.
Reminders on my personal device for really big DO NOT FORGET to dos. Those are rare.I’m kind of like you except unread emails bug me (and I wanna at least briefly read what they have to say—and not have to keep marking them as unread after), so what I do is: I start a draft if I must follow up with it somehow. Then when I have time, I browse through the drafts and fire them off as I get to them.
They bug me too, that’s why this works for me. I almost never leave them there till the next day.
Ha, fair!
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.
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
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
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’m a checklist person, and the free version of ClickUp gives me what I’m after: task status, due date, priority, etc. I’ve also used Notion and Trello in the past, and they were both fine for their respective purposes (knowledge management and kanban boards, respectively).
As for email, anything that comes in gets left unread in my inbox until it’s dealt with, whether that’s a reply, an action, or whatever. Once it’s dealt with, it gets filed into a folder based on topic (Outlook search isn’t super helpful, so the topic breakdown helps).
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.
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
