Eventually I ‘perfected’ as “Daily Journaling” inside my calendar. Eventually I found this approach wouldn’t work and tried a wild, new (and potentially revolutionary) approach that started by writing things down.

Tasks are not set on the fixed cadence laid out at the start of a semester instead, they are dynamic and arrive from multiple sources and people. This approach worked well in a university setting because there was a natural cadence to the work I had to turn in, rarely did an item of work take more than 10 hours to complete, and I was usually the only person responsible for it.Īt work however, the completion time for a task can be hard to estimate and substantially longer, sometimes days or weeks in length. I had been in the habit of managing all my deadlines and assignments in my head during University and thought that I could keep doing this. This might be better called a non-approach and it’s what I did for the first couple years after I graduated college and started working. Over the past few years, I’ve tried (and built) a few a different approaches to answer this question and I wanted to share what I’ve learned and tried along the way. And all the while all you really want to know is 'What should I work on today?' You've got your e-mail, calendar, team chat, task manager and that post-it note from last week all competing for your attention. And then there's lists of stuff you could be doing that's storming in the little universe that exists between your head, iPhone, and desk.

You start with a bunch of stuff you know you've got to do, like getting out of bed (10/10 difficulty), getting dressed and getting to work.

View tasks in evernote