Task Management Strategies
Keeping track of your tasks is an essential part of managing yourself at work. It’s essential that you deliver on your own deadlines and deliverables and track your own stuff so that you can also help your direct reports hit their goals as well.
Everyone’s brain is different so you have to figure out what’s going to work for you. We are big fans of Notion - but you can use whatever tool works for you. Notion has a lot of free templates and you can pick the one that makes the most sense for you.
There are three ways that we typically sort our to-do lists:
By due dates: specific things that must be done, marked by time
By projects: ways of bucketing clients, or areas of work
By people: the people with whom we work and meet with regularly
ORGANIZING BY DUE DATES
Keep a list of the specific tasks that you need to do as related to time - i.e., which is coming up soonest. You want to ensure that every task on your list has a due date - even if you make it up. It will help you rank order tasks by urgency. Every morning and every night, aim to check these lists to keep yourself honest about what needs to get done each day.
ORGANIZING BY PROJECTS
If you were to walk into a grocery store with just a list of raw ingredients, you’d probably forget some important stuff. So, try to think about your tasks with a larger framework in mind - like by recipe instead; it’s much easier to remember the ingredients to chocolate chip cookies as a group than it is to randomly remember each item. Consider keeping a Notion page for each separate project you’re working on so you can keep relevant documents, links, and info in one main place. For instance, you may want a Notion page for all of your blog ideas, for all of your quarterly goals, or as a place to log all of the protocols for a specific experiment. If you want to get fancy, you can tag your tasks in your “by date” list with which project they pertain to so they sync up.
ORGANIZING BY PEOPLE
Finally, it’s helpful to track tasks as they relate to people. Are there things you need to mention or bring up in your next 1:1 with a certain person? Throughout the week, track things you want to discuss in your weekly check-in meeting. It’s also a great way to remember what you asked someone to do or what role you’re playing on a project. It’s up to you, but you can always share the page with that person to have a shared place for aligning tasks, dates, and documents.
WRAPPING IT UP: MAKE SURE TO MAINTAIN YOUR NEW SYSTEM
You’re going to need to figure out what’s going to work best for you. The key here, like so many things, is to commit to a plan. Go all in. Try it for a certain period of time (a week?) then tweak and refine it until you get into a system that works well for you. You may need to do a massive overhaul to your system every few months as your work changes and evolves. That’s OK! Your system should reflect what’s urgent and important right now.
No matter what system you choose, however, you’re going to keep to maintain it. Make sure to block off 15 minutes at the start and end of your day to go in and update your task lists. If you don’t do this regularly, you’ll find that your task management will get out of hand really quickly and will become irrelevant. A few minutes a day will help you keep your tasks reflecting reality - and will prove to be a whole lot more useful for you.