Email, calendar, todo, chat ... How are you keeping it all straight?

This is the domain of work management systems like Jira, Asana or Microsoft Planner combined with a shared calendar. Or a helpdesk/ticketing system depending on the nature of the tasks and how they are generated.

The tasks in the list should ideally be self-contained or with references to the record of things that need to be done, but the end goal is The List is the source of truth, the system of record. The real work begins with getting everyone concerned to adopt the system.

Prioritization is an entire industry in itself with all the different systems around and what these tools support. Eisenhower (the urgent/important matrix), MoSCoW (must/should/could/would), WSJF (weighted shortest job first), the classic low/med/high scale and more.

It's worth a look at agile software development practices and picking some ideas out of it even if you aren't in software development, because prioritizing a never-ending stream of work alongside constantly changing requirements is a very common theme in software development and the methods and practices are an attempt to tackle that.

The agile method was basically borne out of a reaction to highly planned out, rigid and inflexible methods of old-school project planning of software, which were often too late to adjust course late in the cycle when the tasks were already being done and too many resources were already committed for the wrong reasons.

I use obsidian as a to do tracker.

I use a daily note to think about what I need to do that day at the start and note down things I need to do that do as and when they come up on the same. I also have a couple of tasks I need to do every day already set on the template so they are already there every morning.

In meetings I note down todos as they come up in conversation, just in the flow of the notes.

Then I have a master list page, and some tags I use, which collects all my incomplete tasks from all my notes so I don't lose sight of them. I'm crap at going through my notes after a meeting and moving all the little things I said I'd do to somewhere else, in fact I've normally forgotten I said I'd do anything by the end of the meeting.

This way I can write it down as a go along and importantly not lose it straight after. It also solves my long standing problem in other note apps of writing a mini to do list in a page of notes on something then forgetting it's existence. No matter where I put it, it magically appears on my to do list and I get to keep to my preferred working method of combined notes and tasks.

Emails just live in outlook. In theory I put any tasks onto my daily list, in reality there's a good chance I'll forget so I usually action emails immediately. Fortunately I don't get many where that isn't possible.

I'm pretty sure this is going to drive everyone nuts, but I use draft emails to set up everything from to do lists to note keeping. I can title them and add the content I need in an incredibly easy to search directory. As you can probably guess from that snippet I'm a little scattered, but it helps and I know I'll always be able to find it.

I manage my time similarly but with a few differences. If a task takes me less than 10 minutes to accomplish; I just do it. Whatever that task is becomes priority number one and I just knock it out. This is where emails born from conversation fit in as well (shoot me an email to remind me to enable x function or make y edit).

If a task requires outside input, I generate whatever component is mine and send off an email for whatever RFI (request for information) I need, then file that task as "complete" until the email comes back with said information (this is where my email becomes akin to a Todo list). I sometimes leave emails unread to make sure I follow up until I get an updated response.

My actual Todo list tends to be an area where super long term projects go to sit. These are the "nice to do's" that aren't actually a huge priority but if I find time, I action. I also tend to use those tasks as "palate cleanser" tasks. If I don't want to do performance evaluations, I work a little bit off the Todo list before going back to performance evaluations.

Depending on the task, they tend to flirt between those areas. Until a meeting upends my priority list that is.

May not work for everyone but its worked for me. The downside comes when so many 5-10 minute taskers come up that I end up spending my whole day doing them, but thankfully those days are fairly rare /knocksvigorouslyonwood.

I'm a software developer in a small company (~10 people).

Any task that takes longer than 5 minutes goes through the ticketing system (Jira), no exceptions. We might help each other on a ticket here and there, but each ticket is ultimately the responsibility of the person it's assigned to. For big jobs, subtickets are created and assigned to multiple people.

Our team leader keeps track of tickets in the backlog and assigns them to developers based on their priority when somebody's ticket queue starts to get empty.

Sometimes priorities change and tickets get moved around, but it all works very smoothly. There's never any ambiguity about what we need to do, and we can keep track of our progress on each ticket in its comments.

In my past workplaces that weren't this well organised, I would rely heavily on Outlook. I had two key categories that I used:

• Emails that I need to action in some way
• Emails I've sent to somebody that I'm waiting for a response on

I would also flag these emails so I could keep track of them in the tasks list.

For things I needed to do that didn't relate to a particular email, I would block out a chunk of time in the calendar to work on it. That way my day would be divided into several things I needed to do, and I could move those things around as priorities changed. I found it pretty effective, especially in a Microsoft Exchange environment where team members can see each others' calendars. If I blocked out an hour to work on something, coworkers would be able to see that I was busy.

I use taskwarrior

It's been about a year, i put together a few plugins through the years

taskwarrior-tui is a nice terminal interface to quickly jump between contexts and project

i used task-open for some time before writing a custom python script for my use to simply query the taskrc database for a particular task attributes and find the corresponding markdown note to open.

The scripting engine is reallt useful, i base most of my work and personnal projects on this.

Lastly, timewarrior and trackwarrior to collect data about time spent and get some nice graphics with them. I hope to turn it into a kind of dashboard with various metrics of my activites later

It's also really just quite nice to see how i spent my time and how much i did

I also keep my inbox empty, but I mainly use an app called TickTick for my todo list. Google Calendar is the best calendar software I've come across, especially if you have a shared calendar with family.

TickTick also supports shared lists, so my wife and I have a shared todo list as well as a shared calendar. I used to have trouble deciding whether an item should go on the calendar or the todo list, but once I got a feel for things its pretty easy to decide what goes where.

I use a combination of Google Calendar for time-sensitive tasks (e.g visiting the dentist in June, watering the plants) and a Bullet Journal for a todo list (backing up my vacation photos, catching up on my Twitter messages)

If it were up to me I'd use a Bullet Journal for everything, because I love the feel of pens and paper! But it is cumbersome to carry around everywhere, and it will not bark out reminders if I forget something.

I use the GTD Methodology, but in Microsoft To-Do. This let's me have a central place with all of my action items, and I can just plan them out in the morning. It works really well.

I MIGHT switch to monday.com for this because I have a license for other reasons, and in some ways it will be better, but I'm not sure yet.

The key is (no matter what system you use) an active daily review where you are working through your list, know what's on it, select priority, and execute. A weekly cleanup is also good.

I used to use the bullet journal method, and it was good, but it required a lot more effort, where the GTD system (once you're over the hurdle of understanding it) is essentially a stack of task lists.

When questions like this come up, I notice that there are as many answers as there are people. I think that kind of reflects the fact that we all consume, categorize, and process information differently. The tools and processes that people talk about are a reflection of that, and they've found a sufficient representation in the digital/physical world that approximates their mental models.

That's why it's interesting reading people's answers because many of them feel like 'another realm' to me, and mine will probably be the just as alient for them!

Mine is simple for me - I also follow Inbox Zero, but instead of doing an email-to-myself, I now use Microsoft ToDo, which can automatically bring in a flagged email from Outlook as a Todo Task. ToDo fits my model better because when I get an adhoc thing I need to do, I'll write it directly in ToDo. That helps with the Inbox context (emails as a task) and the adhoc context (arbitrary tasks). Most importantly it has a "My Day" view which is what I open first thing in the morning, and decide what I'm doing. And it's totally OK if none of it's done, I just mark important ones as "due tomorrow" and they show up in My Day the next morning.

I currently don’t have a good system in place, but I’m appreciative of all the ideas posted. My email inbox is a big bucket where everything resides. The Gmail nudge feature for things I’ve forgotten about helps a little bit. Otherwise I just keep a paper pad on my desk with a to-do list. I love color coding things with different colors, and there’s a really satisfying feeling that comes from crossing things out.

I enjoy Google Keep for a few reasons:

1. Reminders. You can set time or location based reminders for your to-do lists. Google removed location-based reminders for regular Assistant stuff for whatever reason, but they still work in Keep. Really helpful to enable minimization of items until they become relevant later.
2. Hierarchical checkboxes. Really nice to be able to organize checkboxen into sublists for things.
3. Android integration. There aren't that many hooks overall but being able to do things like yell at my phone to add x to my shopping list and having it work more or less like you'd expect is nice. "Take a note" also works.
4. Labeling, tagging is present and useful if you're into categorization.

I tend to use it as a more-reliable mid-term memory for things that occur to me that I know I'll probably forget if I don't write them down, so I can just yell them at my phone and spend 5m sorting through dictated notes every few days to add reminders, archive irrelevant items, etc. Probably not for everyone but it's just the right mix of structure and unstructure for me.

For me, anything scheduled / time-based goes on my calendar and I prevent people from scheduling stuff over it. Anything major becomes a Jira ticket, and gets prioritized by a product owner who makes that business decision. Anything minor or stuff that just doesn't deserve to be a ticket goes into a to-do list that I keep in a notebook (old fashioned, I know... but I like the satisfaction of checking things off, I guess).

I started out organizing my stuff with the system described in Time Management for System Administrators and adapted it over the years according to my needs. At first I kept a folder with a calendar and sheets of paper -- one for a todo list, one for notes on each project, one for long-term goals, etc. After switching to WFH I no longer need my notes to be portable, so these days I'm using remind(1) for a calendar, a ~/todo text file for my main todo list, a todo file in each project directory for project notes, and ~/*.txt files for topics and projects that don't have a digital presence. I have the p!n app on my phone for those rare occasions that I need to jot something down while I'm out and about so I don't forget. The only thing I still use paper for is my grocery list.

Check this guy out. He’s got some good productivity ideas that build on GTD. He focuses more on personal productivity, but it can be incorporated with some of the team project management tools mentioned here.

I do the opposite of you. I have a perpetual inbox where email is never deleted. If an important task comes through in an email, I flag it and it's added to the tasks section of outlook. I always have my tasks pane on the right side of outlook. I also keep two stenographer pads at my desk. One is my to-do list and the other is for note taking during certain tasks. If a scheduled event comes up, I add it to my calendar. I try to keep it as simple as possible.

I'm a naturally chaotic and disorganized person (diagnosed ADHD way back in 1987, woo), but I tend to overcompensate with intense organizational systems. I'm trying to scale it back to something a little more manageable that I won't end up sidetracked organizing the organization system, and ToDoist has been working best for me for a solid year+. It syncs to my google calendar, and I decided the price was reasonable for email reminders. It works for everything from my household laundry system, to scheduling appointments for my kids, to my teaching responsibilities.

I used Habitica for my everyday stuff, because gamification works on me.

Microsoft To-Do for my lists like crafting, teaching etc, and because my work uses Outlook for emails, it's easy to access from my work account. The little "ding!" when you complete a task is pure dopamine for me.

In my personal life, I use the iOS reminders app for checklists (I have a decent travel checklist, for example), and a calendar to schedule To-Do tasks. I have ADHD, so having a time scheduled with as many reminders as I need is really helpful.

Professionally, I use a combination of Jira, Bitbucket, Edge’s tab groups feature, Outlook’s calendar, and Windows Sticky Notes. I keep a tab group with the Bitbucket PR list and the list of Jira tasks assigned to me, and another one with a tab for each task I’m working on that day. I keep checklists for things like how I like to approach different kinds of tasks and company processes in sticky notes on my computer’s desktop. I occasionally use Outlook reminders.

I've always used org mode in Emacs. It's a simple system that I'm kind of stuck to. Org mode can do a ton, but I use it for todo lists and managing dates on the calendar.

You can use Emacs as an email client as well. I don't currently do this, but there are a few ways of making it happen.

I use Migadu for email and Google for everything else. For notes I really like Obsidian, or just a simple text editor.