I had a moment of panic followed by clarity and motivation when I realized my tenuous approach to managing tasks at work was no longer tenable. I needed to make a change.
A Wrinkle
My company uses ClickUp for project management, so I use it to track larger projects in the Sales department, conferences we attend, and other items that involve multiple people. To reduce clutter in that system, and because I had used it during my time on the curriculum team, I relied on Google Tasks to create one-off tasks that only I needed to do. There’s a handy sidebar in Gmail that makes it easy to manage these.
Then we switched to using Front to manage our team email. It took me a day or two before I understood how this took away the easy access to Google Tasks, leaving me without a reliable task management system for daily work. Whoops.
Look to the Past
When I was a project manager I had a routine of writing down my plan for the day every morning. Sometimes it was on paper, other times in a text document, but the goal was the same: create a tentative plan to hold my future self accountable throughout the day and simplify any “downtime” by having a task somewhere later in the queue.
As the day went on I would rearrange items, add in ad-hoc meetings, and have space to include additional notes. Each day I’d then have a tangible way to determine what I had accomplished, and could easily reflect on what led to final state of this agenda. Had I let myself get distracted somehow? Had other tasks come up that were higher priority? I could also immediately see what was left over and prepare to handle whatever was necessarily delayed to another day.
I never felt more on top of work than when this process was humming along. So of course I stopped doing it over time.1There is a funny tendency, after doing something for a while and things are good, to forget why they’re good. Then you figure you can stop doing this superfluous task that makes things take longer and it’s shocking when everything stops going so well. So a sudden change in my workflow helped me remember this excellent routine I’d let go, and I took half a day to reconsider how I can get it back and improve upon it.
Details
Here is my adjustment at its core: Make a plan each day using a task system, record any changes made to the plan throughout the day, and update the task system for the next day.
I decided it’s best to keep everything in ClickUp. I’m already using it for team projects, and making a new list for my personal tasks is a simple addition. ClickUp helpfully provides a calendar view synced with my Google Calendar, in addition to listed “Today” and “Upcoming” sections of my homepage. This all lets me look at one source of information for everything I need to do in a given day
Having one source is only useful if it’s reliable. Making sure nothing gets lost in my task system requires a few internal rules:
- Every task gets written down.
- Every task has a due date—even if it’s tentative.
- Freely use sub-tasks to organize ideas.
The first rule is vital: if I can’t trust that everything I need to do is recorded, the system fails to do its job. The second rule gives me further confidence I won’t miss anything, because eventually each task will trickle to the “Today section. The final rule is a practical element to good project management, though it can be interpreted differently without greatly affecting the final results. I simply prefer having precise tasks rather than comments or notes in the description.
A key adjustment to my agenda-focused workflow is to dedicate an entire page of paper to a single day, rather than only use the minimal necessary space for the day’s schedule. I still write down the schedule but am left with enough room to jot down notes and, most importantly, any new tasks that show up during the workday. Having this dedicated space encourages me to write down everything I may do so I can reprioritize tasks as needed. I’ll cross off anything that gets completed during the day, and take the final fifteen minutes of work to add or update tasks in ClickUp.
I’ve found this system minimizes distractions during the day and ensures I have a record of what I wanted to accomplish. Taking a few additional minutes of keep all my tasks under control is an ideal tradeoff, and leaves me with a concrete way to measure the effectiveness of my day. This system is also portable to any tool you may use to hold the actual data of your tasks. I use Todoist in my personal life, and in the past tried out a wonderful app called Agenda that—were I working entirely independently—would be a great fit for my current approach. Regardless of your choice of tool, the fundamentals remain the same and hopefully can provide a starting point to better organization.
- 1There is a funny tendency, after doing something for a while and things are good, to forget why they’re good. Then you figure you can stop doing this superfluous task that makes things take longer and it’s shocking when everything stops going so well.