Efficient Task Management

People commonly say to me ‘you’re the most organised person I’ve ever known’. For a nerd like me, it’s a nice thing to hear. I believe what people think of me is: she’s a robot, effortlessly juggling multiple tasks, always able to find an email or a document needed for evidence, always on time. What they don’t appreciate is the system* behind the scenes, which I have built and keep improving, to deserve that opinion. 

*Before I dive into it, note: what works for me may not work for everyone. Let it be food for thought rather than an instruction forced upon you. I am always keen to learn how others do things so please, share your tricks, educate me, make me better.

The Holy Notebook

The Holy Notebook is always near. It’s as thick as they go, A4 - my format of choice. It comes with my favourite Pilot pen, which I clip to the spiral spine when carrying my notebook around (one of those things). The fact it’s my favourite pen matters because it makes the experience of taking notes nicer. Why would one care about it? The answer is: why the hell not?

When I start a new day, I open the Holy Notebook and keep it ready. Then I make notes of everything.

First, notes from meetings and calls. Whether it’s my meeting or someone else’s that I was invited to, I make notes of important or interesting things being mentioned. I leave marks if anything needs clarification or follow up, using a simple, repeatable system, which helps me keep on top of things when reviewing my notes from previous days. I theme my notes, give them clear titles. Don’t think my notes are tidy, quite the opposite. I populate the page in all directions and doodle a lot, that’s my style. But thanks to the repeatable patterns (like a circled exclamation mark here and there), I know what to search for when revisiting.

I also use the Holy Notebook to design processes and data flows, to tease out basic decision trees, in order to kick start the right frame of mind. Once the (typically messy) framework of the concept appears, I move to digital tools, using my doodles as baseline.

Back in the day, I used to leave myself TO DO lists in the Holy Notebook. This form of task management, however, doesn’t really allow diligent progress tracking (things are either TO DO or crossed out, when done). That’s where kanban board steps in, and, if done right, it can make a real difference to your work efficiency.

Kanban board

Kanban, as a system, is yet another artefact of Lean management, originating from Toyota Production System (although some sources say that the roots of Kanban reach the XVII century!). The approach aims to manage work by balancing demands with available capacity, and a key part of it is the visualisation of work items and their progress (kanban board). Importantly, work is being pulled when capacity becomes available, as opposed to being pushed into the process on demand.

On the kanban board, tasks are moved between themed columns. There isn’t really a prescribed list of columns, but I would recommend at least the basic three: ‘to do’, ‘doing’ and ‘done’. For someone only just embarking on their journey with task management, this could be a good start - likely to be expanded on in time. 

My kanban board has these main columns:

• To do: tasks prioritised to be pulled into the process when there is next capacity;

• In progress: tasks I’m currently working on;

• Waiting: tasks on hold, awaiting either someone else’s input or action. These items are currently not in progress;

• Done: no more work will be done on tasks in this column, they have been completed;

• Backlog: items not currently prioritised but valuable enough to keep them planned for the future.

Please note: backlog is not ‘to do’. Backlog is ‘this stuff is worthwhile when the right time comes for it’. Tasks in the backlog should be ordered by business value and size, even if based on gut feeling only. When the ‘to do’ list shrinks or - better still - becomes empty, you should be able to look at your backlog and pull the next best value tasks to work on.

A few people have asked me how long the items should be kept in the ‘done’ column. This will depend on whether and how often you need to report on your progress (keeping track of your achievements should be the main deciding factor here). If you have a weekly progress report then there isn’t really much point in keeping old items in ‘done’ for much longer than a week. I know it may be tempting to keep a long list of ‘done’ and feel smug about it, but it may eventually strike you as a bit of an overkill. You choose what’s the most efficient for you.

The system

To efficiently manage my tasks, I made the kanban board the centre of my universe. What’s on the board gets into the pipeline. Equally, what’s not on the board doesn’t get worked on.

To make this happen, a diligent system of capturing tasks needs to be in place. These originate from the Holy Notebook (actions from calls, requests made in direct conversations, research, etc.) but also from chats (Teams, Slack, etc.) and from emails. To fully switch into task management from the kanban board, you need to make sure that no other system feeds into your process (so no ‘I’ll get back to this later’ Teams chats or emails). 

Be wary not to create enormous tasks for yourself. In Agile project management (which serves as inspiration from time to time), work is commonly organised into epics, stories and tasks. What you want to avoid is making epics your tasks. If you do, they will sit in your ‘in progress’ for ages, before you’re able to move them to ‘done’. Story and task-size items are much more manageable and move across the board at a decent pace.

Clean inbox (teaser)

Now, this is something that I’m really smug about. I have a clean inbox - and by ‘clean’ I mean: zero emails, read or unread. People utter little squeaks when they get a glance of it and it fills me with an immense sense of job well done. And no, I don’t just bin my emails! I read them and any actions they throw my way, I immediately log in the kanban board. Then I don’t need the emails any more, other than for evidence and follow-up purposes.

I will write a separate piece on how to achieve a clean inbox, because, as you might suspect, it’s quite a project, if starting from a messy inbox. For the purpose of efficient workload management theory, it needs to be mentioned here as one of the enabling factors. It’s entirely possible to run a kanban board and keep a messy inbox at the same time, but I can guarantee, some optimisation opportunities are missed here. If you have a messy inbox - or if you think you could handle your emails better - think about small improvements first. Set up a basic kanban board (I’d recommend using Trello’s free version for it). Practice moving actions from emails to the kanban board and see if you can notice any difference in efficiency and the sense of workload control. Start building good habits and discipline and it’s going to be worth your while. Then, when you’re ready, come back to read my handbook to clean inbox* (and join the light side!).

*I will write it eventually and link to this post, promise, it’s on my list. ‘To do’ list.