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.

  • Skydancer@pawb.socialItaliano
    1·
    18 hours ago

    Org Mode.

    I’m generally a vim user, but for job-related task management I set up emacs with evil (too many) years ago. There were vim plugins to reimplement pieces of it, but none of them covered all the functions I would use (that may have changed in the last decade, but I have a working system so it wasn’t worth the effort to check). I add tasks, tag priorities, and set recurrences for maintenance tasks. For billable or potentially billable tasks I use the built in clocking.

    I make relevant notes under the tasks as I work on them, keep the finished task until weekly manager meetings, then archive them so they don’t clutter my working file but remain searchable if ever needed (which is more often than you might think).

    I add new tasks at the top. Unfinished lower priority tasks get pushed down out of sight over time. When we hit a slow period, I review them and archive anything no longer relevant, then reprioritize and start working through the backlog.