How do you organize your tasks/projects?
Going on 9 years working on websites (both full-time and side projects) and I'm still messing around with my todos.
I've used a few dozen to-do list apps, but the to-do list has it's own inherent problems; poor prioritization, lists tend to balloon over time, and tasks get lost or forgotten.
I've used Trello extensively. I like the Kanban-style state views, but tend to add too many lists and boards. It's also difficult to track
I've been experimenting with building a solution in Notion, which allows for more inter-connectivity between tasks and projects. I like having multiple views into my tasks and projects. I haven't switched over to this full-time yet, hard to say whether it's going to work.
In the past few months I've gone back to pen and paper and bullet journaling my days. This tends to get messy, it doesn't give any insight into projects or bigger-picture stuff, and it's obviously all stuck in a physical notebook.
How about you? How do you organize your tasks and projects? What do you like or dislike about your system?
My productivity setup is a total mess.
I use a combination of Notion, Airtable, Slack, and Makerlog - using menubar.getmakerlog.com mostly and the frontend for interaction :)
Notion is pretty cool but it is quite expensive.
^ similar, though without Airtable. I did have todoist as well, but as I use G-Suite I use tasks there as needed. I like todoist's date/alerts feature, however i find it to be a bit expensive for what it is.
Notion, I really like, and if it had notification/date features that would allow the full replacement of something like todoist/g-suite tasks I'd use it more.
I'm still giving Notion a fair go, as I paid for the year for it, but next year I'll probably revise it and see what else is available if I'm not using it as much as I wanted to.
I use getmakerlog when I update my project status and such as well.
A very similar story for me too… after more than 11 years my task management is still much more chaotic and sloppy than I would want. It's a combination of Makerlog, Trello and… post-its. I'll detail (a little bit too much, sorry):
Makerlog helped a lot, but I wish I could add private tasks or private task details, there are still some tasks that I do not log publicly or log as a superficial summary. For me the best thing was the streak which is keeping me shipping even when I get lazy or bored or too tired. I take the name Maker Log literally :P and use it strictly for work tasks, I don't log personal or irrelevant tasks. I'll keep it that way, because I don't want to fool myself that I'm shipping when I actually just logged having lunch, baking cookies or something similar. (At this point Sergio would probably throw the tomatoes at me, because this makes me a grinch in a maker community :D). I'm also finding that writing this actually puts some thoughts in order about my task management, and really makes me want to improve it.
I still use Trello more out of habit and not having a better alternative to migrate to. Trello is not really a good fit for me because I constantly go from task to task and from one project to another, and it bugs me to change board every time. I also tend to add a lot of lists and usually end up moving the Trello app window from the laptop display to my external display because horizontally scrolling from Ideas, multiple TO DO lists, Doing, Done and so on becomes a pain in the ass.
Post-its — the weirdos in my workflow. I use them sporadically, for some reason sometimes they just help with remembering stuff, and a little bit with focusing on a certain task rather than drifting to another 10 ones until I forget where I started from and what I initially wanted to do. They are my last resort when I start working on a task and then see other X improvements I can make and directly start working on them instead of just logging them in a board for later.
I have a gitlab instance. so everything is quite simple. Due to different labels + projects, I have different task lists. e.g. a to-do label puts all the issues i have in the to do now list.
Through links in my bookmarks I always get prepared lists. eq:
https://GITLAB-INSTANCE/dashboard/issues?state=opened&utf8=%E2%9C%93&assignee_id=2&label_name%5B%5D=To%20Do
The whole thing is paired with different labels:
Priority / Topic Labels
- Discussion
- To Do
- complexity: Easy Pick
- complexity: High
- complexity: Low
- complexity: Medium
- priority: Critical
- priority: High
- priority: Low
- priority: Medium
State Labels
- state: Can't reproduce
- state: Confirmed
- state: In Progress
- state: Needs Informations
- state: Needs tests
- state: Pending
- state: Won't fix
Type Labels
- type: Bug
- type: Documentation
- type: Enhancement
- type: Feature Request
- type: Optimization
- type: Refactoring
- type: Security
- type: Support
By this categorization i am able to filter and prepar all stuff and I lose nothing :-)
Right now, I'm mostly organized using a big multi-sheet Numbers spreadsheet -- basically a digital bullet journal. I tried a physical bullet journal for a while, which I generally liked, but I've found I prefer the flexibility of digital and the fact that I can easily shift around the format make updates or fix mistakes without the mess of physical pen/paper.
Some of the sheets within the spreadsheet:
- A Kanban-style Overview sheet, with entries for all projects I'm working on organized and color coded roughly by status (active, waiting, upcoming, etc.) and priority.
- A projects sheet, with a column for each of my major projects and to do items listed underneath.
- A goals page for overall goals and projects that I use as a daily reminder
- Yearly and monthly sheets for tracking important dates, events, completed projects, etc. Helpful since I have semi-terrible memory.
- A daily sheet with a line for each day, where I log a summary of the day, progress towards goals, habits, etc.
- Misc sheets for memories (basically couple sentence journal entries for things I did, enjoyed, etc.), inspiration, etc.
Thanks for the answers!
Sergio - I’m loving Makerlog for Streaks and the productivity visualizations. Even the background bar chart on the Log page helps to push me forward.
Matt - I’m with you on Notion needing notifications. An API is supposed to be next on their product roadmap, so here’s hoping.
Alina - thanks for the detailed description! I feel the same about Trello; it’s great on a small scale, but falls apart as I try to manage the big picture.
Henning - you lost me at ‘gitlab instance’, but I’m glad it’s working for you! Do you use this system for managing bigger picture stuff, like goals and planning?
Ben - thanks for the outline! Have you tried Notion? It sounds like you’re using Numbers for something similar. The spreadsheet is definitely a versatile tool, I come back to it a lot but mostly for numbers and calculations.
Ah sorry @isaacholmgren. You can see GitLab as the same like Github. Its like the free open source pendant. https://about.gitlab.com/.
just because i have to keep track of more than 50 projects, gitlab shows its potential very well.
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