As a new year begins and I settle into a new-ish position at work, it has been time to again rethink my task management strategy.

Let’s set out the constraints first. My work computing ecosystem is a highly-constrained Windows laptop. My employer doesn’t provide any sort of task management software, and restricts any data flow between company devices and personal devices. I have access to my work email and calendar on my personal device, but it’s very hard to move data back and forth between domains.

Historically I haven’t really used task management apps. I have downloaded free ones and purchased paid ones on occasion, tried them out for a week or two, and then fell away from them one I got comfortable enough with the new task or role that the overhead of using the tool outweighed the benefit it provided me. I use my email inbox as my primary to-do list. If an email is still in the inbox, it means I need to take action on it. I like to use the inbox “snooze” function when I can to dismiss the email from my inbox and bring it back at some scheduled later date, but unfortunately “snooze” only works on the web version of Outlook, not the app versions, so I rarely use it. The upside of this is that I always have all my pending tasks staring me in the face. The downside of this is that I always have all my pending tasks staring me in the face.

I paid for Things on my iPhone and iPad a few years ago and have largely neglected them. But right now I have just enough different and new things on my plate between work and church that I need a coordinated reminder system to help make sure I don’t forget something. So last week I jumped back into Things, added a few categories and a couple dozen tasks, put a widget on my iPad Home Screen, and decided to give it a go.

I’m sure I cribbed my basic pattern for using Things from Rands but I have no idea which post. It works like this:

  1. During the day, as new to-dos come up, dump them into the Things inbox with as little overhead as possible.
  2. Every morning, triage that Inbox, assign due dates to things that need them, and file them appropriately into projects.
  3. Every morning, after triage, see what’s in Today. If there’s enough to keep me busy all day, I’m done. If I have some extra bandwidth, review the “Someday” tasks to see if there’s so thing to pull into Today.
  4. Start working and checking off tasks once they’re completed!

I’ve been working this way for a couple weeks now and I think it might take this time. I really enjoy being able to just quickly dump a to-do onto my phone when I think of it, knowing that I’ve already got a plan for reviewing it later. I have also unexpectedly enjoyed not having all my to-dos staring me in the face. By doing the triage and scheduling tasks, I have a level of comfort in knowing that whatever is on my Today widget on my iPad is all I need to worry about today. I’ve had a couple small panics so far where I jump into the Upcoming view to make sure I do have some particular task scheduled, but I suppose that’ll fade as I start getting more consistent with using Things every day.