When I started this series, I was excited to take a hard look at my task management. I’m productive, but I hadn’t really settled on a system yet. My Evernote system is ON POINT and flows, and I wanted that in Todoist. Forcing myself to try out different systems and blogging about it helped with keeping track of what I liked, didn’t like, and designing a system that works for me. All that being said, I start with what I tell everyone who asks me about how to get organized: You have to know yourself. You can have the best designed system in the world, but if it’s not conducive to how you operate, it won’t work. I’m going to share how I designed my system, and I hope you find some ideas, but feel free to tweak what doesn’t work for you. After using all these different systems and reading about even more, I’ve pulled from everything to set-up Todoist (my task manager of choice) for every day task management. RELATED: Emily & the Eisenhower Matrix First, projects. I discussed the Kanban Method, which I do like for project management. Trello is my project manager of choice, but some boards will contain tasks that I want to keep in Todoist. I use a Trello board for this blog. Posts have a few different steps to go through between being an idea and actually showing up on your screen, and so I set-up a few applets/recipes in IFTTT to make this happen. When I move a post’s card in Trello to the “Writing” column, it automatically creates a task in Todoist to actually write the dang post. This way, all my tasks are in one place. I’ve written about IFTTT before, but you can really spend hours playing around in it and setting up hundreds of services to send things to your Todoist behind the scenes. I use similar applets for other boards that will contain tasks specific for me to complete. I did like the Eisenhower Matrix as far as giving things a priority ranking. I looked around, and for me, I found the Must/Should/Could to be better. Priority 1 in Todoist goes to tasks that I must do that day. Priority 2 goes to things I should do that day, but it’s not the end of the world if I don’t. Priority 3 goes to things I could do if I have time. I use priority 4 as a way to filter tasks that either labeled “waiting” or “spark” (more on that in a bit). I explained that GTD was one of my favorites, so I pulled from that system as much as possible. For example, context. The beauty of being in virtual operations means I can work anywhere, so I can assume everything in my work project is email or online. If a task is a phone call, or old fashioned snail mail, I label it as such. I also have a label for errands, which is for things that need to be done out of the house, and travel, which is for things that are related to going on a trip. GTD uses a “next action” label for projects. I assume everything on my list is a “next action” unless...
So, how does it look in action? When I get a task, I get it into Todoist. A task doesn’t have to be formal, but more of an “oh I should…” Todoist makes this easy, but most task managers do. Even if I don’t put it into a project, I at least get it into my Todoist Inbox to deal with later. I have five separate projects in Todoist to correspond with the five different areas of my life: work, personal, extracurriculars, hobbies, and family/friends. I have an extra project for my Tickler file. I’ve given each a different color, and broken them down further by labels. For instance, my Work project has labels for things like this blog, accounting, and one for each of my clients. My Extracurricular project uses labels for my various memberships (book club, Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, etc). Personal has things like chores, finance, etc. My Hobbies and Family/Friends projects aren’t used as heavily as the others, and include labels for sports (editing Fantasy Football line-ups) and sewing (pick up an item that I need to do a project). I don’t have any labels in my Family/Friends project, and this is used for tasks that include mailing birthday gifts. Every task goes into a project, gets a label to identify what sub section it goes into, then assigned a priority level. Occasionally, I will add a label for context. Finally, I add due dates if necessary. Yes, this seems cumbersome, but given Todoist using plain language, it really couldn’t be easier. For instance, I’m in charge of my family’s football pool this season. I have some recurring tasks set-up to send pick sheets and results every week (in my Hobbies project, labeled “sports”). As I worked on Week 11, I realized Week 12 was the week of Thanksgiving, which meant I would need to get the sheets back a day earlier since there were games on Thursday. Using the QuickAdd, I simply typed “Email Week 12 (due 10am) #Hobbies !p1 @sports Monday.” This immediately put the task of “Email week 12 (due 10am)” into the Hobbies project, labeled sports, priority 1, and a due date of Monday. I’m done, I can keep working, and on Monday, it will be on my list. Lastly, why do I use labels instead of sub-projects? The same reason I use tags in Evernote - some things cross projects. My “travel” label, for instance, is what I use when I’m going out of town. That includes work AND personal tasks (email clients schedule, pack, clean out the fridge). Instead of bouncing around different projects, I can filter by the “travel" label and see everything I need to do before I leave, and also see it on my regular list. Again, Todoist is my preference, but having an actual system instead of a free for all has already brought me peace of mind. It feels great to put each task through a simplified flowchart of sorts for getting things organized and neat, and I can't wait to see my productivity go even farther. I'll update this after some time with how it works, but after a week, it's already making a difference. Hopefully you got some ideas for your own system, and feel free to copy mine. After Thanksgiving, we're going to delve into TIME MANAGEMENT. I'll see you then. You can subscribe to my mailing list here. You can also follow me on Twitter or Pinterest. If you’re in need of a virtual operations manager, check out my FAQs or available services, then head over to my consultation page so we can connect.
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