Office dwellers, what software/website or system do you use to keep track of tasks you need to do?
Office dwellers, what software/website or system do you use to keep track of tasks you need to do?
Caldav with decsync and syncthing to synchronize across devices
Teams boards (shared to dos)
Planner (personal lists)
Writing it down on a sticky note (priority)
Servicetitan Task Management (ugh, not a huge fan but required).
Monday (shared and I really like this one but it’s only for a particular dept’s needs).
~/scratch.txt in my text editor of choice opened automatically on startup with a keyboard shortcut to show/hide it
And GitHub issues for collaboration
Tasks.org Android app and desktop thing.
Jira and mails marked as unread until i have worked through them haha :)
My system is people asking me when stuff will be done
Yall gonna hate me,
But teams planner planner is super neat since you can use buckets. And others can use it too.
I honestly don't hate teams. It's pretty neat once you get mildly used to it!
I was just thinking this yesterday. I went from hating Teams, to liking it better than Slack, and then actually finding it super convenient.
I do really wish we could put chats and threads into folders. I have so many in the sidebar … so many.
I don't hate teams but I hate that call ringtone. I get triggered everytime I hear it 😂
My group uses teams to assign tasks and keep track of things we finished.
Super convenient for repetitive tasks that you do every week.
A little notebook I carry around with me
This is me, boss comes in with a new task, I immediately whip out my green notebook and start writing as he’s talking then let him know I’ll get to it when I’m done with my current task. I use black for writing out the task and subtasks, red for checking items I’ve completed already, slashing through tasks that are no longer required, or writing notes that come up during the task (like ticket numbers). I think I’m like just below halfway through the notebook I started in February.
Todo.txt
And also
Calendar.txt
Calendar as plaintext is cursed.
Works fine for me, but I do not have complicated needs, thankfully. I agree that if you have many appointments in a day it doesn’t work well.
Service Now.
If it's not a ticket it's not a task that needs doing.
Don't complain to me, that is what the company policy says.
That's the fun part, I don't!
(okay maybe a little bit of Jira)
Obsidian with tasks and kanban Plugin. Open them side by side
Obsidian with calendar plugin here.
emacs org-mode
People ask me to do shit and I do it... unless someone asks me to do something else before I'm done.
Can you expand on your wiki usage?
Sure. I use it as a structured place to keep notes on anything that may be important later, not specifically tasks:
- Important people in my life (friends and family) with a short bio, where we met, favorite food, allergies, ideas what I could get them for their birthdays, links to their social media profiles, plans for shared vacations, maybe a few photos.
- Recipes from all kinds of sources. If they are from a video or one of those "scroll past three pages of sentimental nonsense" sites, I summarize them and translate them into German with metric units.
- Lists with interesting links about 3D printing, software development and so on. Keeping these in a wiki instead of just my browser's bookmarks list allows me to better categorize them and add notes.
- A list of open questions and project ideas that I can't research right now like "Where is the best place to get custom printed LEGO minifigs?" and "Why do the zfs drives in my home server sometimes have problems waking up from sleep?"
- Lists of interesting products/books/movies/... that I might buy/read/watch/... at some point
- Some writing stuff: D&D campaigns, short stories, diary-like entries
- A list of all computers in my household with hardware specs, operating system and so on
All of those get put into categories and the categories are displayed on the main page via the categorytree plugin. The nice thing about having a wiki is that you have a lot of options for linking or embedding related content while still keeping it somewhat organized.
Pen and paper lol
Airtable. It's like Trello on steroids. Extremely flexible but you have to set it up all yourself.
Airtable for me as well. Set myself up a perfect tasks and notes system. Both played so well together, created quick in the moment through a form that flowed to tables. Tables used an Eisenhower matrix to prioritize day to day. Was perfect, I felt so far ahead of my work, felt accomplished each day and then my company was acquired. They won't let us use aurtable and now I'm just lost and have said fuck it.
New system is to say I'll do it in the moment, and then see what I can remember each day through nags or context clues left around in open tabs and emails and hope I don't drop the ball too hard. Fuck big stupid corporate machines that eat good people and shit out temporary shareholder value!!!
Whichever the project manager set up for the team
Nothing worked for me until I designed my own planner. I like to take things one week at a time so every Friday afternoon, I print out enough sheets for the next week on semi-A4 paper, folded and stapled to a semi-A5 booklet.
One full page for each day with:
- Compact visual schedule of the day with a time grid (hours on the y-axis, 10s of minutes on the x-axis) and recurring events pre-printed
- "Today" box to write down reminders and tasks that don't go on a time grid
- Section to jot down miscellaneous thoughts and ideas
- Right half of the page entirely for a journal entry
Front cover has the weekly overview and back cover has upcoming and assorted tasks.
No monthly calendar, any entry that needs to persist for longer than a week or so goes in a separate hardcover A5 journal that is usually in my bag.
A personal wiki or a text file, depending on the place. Would be nice to have some compact non invasive ticket system, but I've never seen one.
I've used literal card decks and GTDish pen and paper systems when there was more demanding need on tracking things. They're effective.
TickTick
It's what Wunderlist used to be like before Microsoft bought them and buggered it up, but keeps getting improvements.
Logseq. Free, cross-platform (I just sync my journals through github), more convenient than any other notes or tasks app I've ever used since it auto-organizes everything you tag with graph db relationships. Organizing and constantly reorganizing my notes and tasks has always taken the longest amount of time, and now I can just stream of consciousness everything and let the app do the work. I hear Obsidian is good too, and it was next on my list to try if Logseq didn't work out. But I do love Logseq.
I use jira software for task management! It’s just me on the team, so it’s maybe a bit overkill, but I’ve found scrum / sprints to be massively helpful in prioritizing important work.
It sucks jira is in the cloud, but I’m yet to find an open source scrum system with the same features. Taiga.io comes close, but i don’t yet have a reason to switch; i’ve been using Jira for two years with no issues.
We use Asana. At least it's fast and responsive.
I've got various text files in Markdown format.
I also use a small CLI program to loosely manage them. Basically, it just creates a new file in a predetermined folder and opens it in my text editor, which I've bound to a global shortcut, so it's just one keypress for me to start jotting something down.
Well, and then it also allows searching through all note files and things like that.What's that small CLI program called?
It's this one: https://codeberg.org/trem/jot/
Why not try Obsidian?
Not a fan of it using Electron and a proprietary license.
But I also actually like this workflow. Being able to note things in my regular text editor with the keybindings I know, is quite important to me.
Well, and an even more personal preference, but my way of using a desktop OS involves a lot of workspaces, so the global shortcut to summon a new editor window on the current workspace actually gets a lot of use.
Post-Its and flagged Slack messages if I ever remember to check those
Markdown files and Logseq https://logseq.com/ as the front end. I've been using Mardown for over 10 years, and it's worked for me. Work uses JIRA, but I keep my own notes and copy in them in as necessary.
Outlook. It's obviously shit but it notifies me of stuff which is all I need.
Taskwarrior, tried lots and lots of ones but always come back to Taskwarrior. It just works the way my brain does, and has tons of features that I actually use because they are intuitive and easy to remember how to.
Jira
I track everything private and professional on Notion.
I have dedicated databases for
- tasks, divided by type (reminders, activities, chores), by domain (job, household, politics, writing etc etc), by client, by status
- calls and meetings I have to set up
- credits and debits I have open
- classes and workshops I'm hosting
In the past I've used Spice, RT, Jira at work. Freshdesk free works for home. Also a simple bullet list in Google docs.
If you're a terminal weirdo like me I'd recommend Taskwarrior
Jira , mostly. It kind of sucks but it's what we use.
Sublime text for quick notes.
Some people like notion but I often find it redundant with jira, and it's often write-only memory.
wekan
Standard notes? They got bought out by proton
I use an ipad at work and use ajournal to write down my schedule for each day. I like that it pulls in my outlook items and that is easy to edit- write, erase, drag to another day. I don't like that it's not backed up anywhere so when i lost my iPad anything not done/documented is lost forever. When i get super freaked out about that i take a screenshot.