Ask Lemmy

Depends on whether the team I am in uses Scrum or not.

If it uses Scrum, everything is on the backlog, so rarely do I need personal lists.

If we don’t use Scrum, then I set up my own personal Scrum board so that people can see and think for themselves my ‘tasks’ when wanting to make a change in priority, ask for something new, or make any change.

Ticket system.
Not there, (usually) not my task.
Except for my superior and I'll usually try to make him to create a ticket.

Jira.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My job is pretty chill, so I only have a todo.txt on my desktop

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.

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.

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 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).

Ultimately use what works for you, digital only doesn't for me, I end up using whatever project tool the project uses (often az devops or jira) for large tasks, but I've kept logbooks/journals since uni using a symbol system that makes sense to me, refine it over time especially in the last 8 years or so. A star is important, ? Bubble is investigation, o is a regular task/thought, arrows for sub/related thoughts. Also like to tag my commit messages with my ticket/item number, some systems auto link them but even without, nice to have that linkage for recollection.

I'm not the best at indexing but everything is dated, memory is usually solid enough to recall the types of work I did in a period so been able to pull up past stuff pretty readily when need be. I have ADHD so found that externalised thought works well for me, I tend to spend a bit in the morning reviewing the day prior or time at the end of the day moving stuff I've not got to. Generally they're notes while working, just to capture frame of mind or future ideas. I could see using markdown for the same idea, but I've seen suggestions that paper notes are better for retention and anecdotally I've found that to be true.

Has actually helped a few times for cyoa purposes, but that's a secondary benefit to me. My email inbox is horrendous (so much advertising and spam emails for people who don't work here anymore but were on my team so they're forwarded to me), even my BACN filters aren't perfect and I frankly don't bother reading everything. Should delete or purge more often but if it's important, I'll read it and make a ticket.

I have tickets in Jira for big things and for small things tasks in Confluence in the meeting minutes and collect them automatically on my confluence home page.