Last week­end, I was struck by sud­den inspi­ra­tion to opti­mise my task man­age­ment. By ‘opti­mise’, I mean I’ve man­aged to hack togeth­er a solu­tion that meets all my needs and cri­te­ria with a bunch of apps and tools. I’m gonna call it my task man­age­ment ‘stack’.

It got me think­ing — every­one must have their own unique set­up, their own needs, cri­te­ria, and soft­ware inte­gra­tions, to get to what they need. So I’m inter­est­ed — what makes a good task man­age­ment stack, and what kind of solu­tions have oth­er peo­ple come up with?

Why optimise?

There’s an anec­dote that I heard once, that has stuck with me: Barack Oba­ma does­n’t choose what he wears in the morn­ing — he has a sys­tem.

As it hap­pens, it’s a con­scious deci­sion on his part to reduce unnec­es­sary ener­gy expen­di­ture on the mun­dane, and to pre­vent deci­sion fatigue.

And for me this is where a well-opti­mised stack comes in. Whilst, I’m fair­ly cer­tain remem­ber­ing to buy cat­food does­n’t require the same kind of deci­sion mak­ing as pre­vent­ing a cri­sis in the Mid­dle East — reduc­ing the amount of effort required to oper­ate effi­cient­ly day-to-day can at least help me to become a bet­ter, more pro­duc­tive per­son.

As expressed neat­ly by Fast Com­pa­ny “man­ag­ing deci­sion fatigue calls for the high-val­ue, low-effort sys­tem­iza­tion that entre­pre­neurs swear by. Whether or not our offices are oval, we need to find ways to reduce fric­tion in our days.”

And as the cur­rent Com­man­der-in-Chief voiced: “You need to focus your deci­sion-mak­ing ener­gy. You need to rou­tinize your­self. You can’t be going through the day dis­tract­ed by triv­ia.”

It’s very easy to find your­self stuck under a moun­tain of work and respon­si­bil­i­ties, and I’m sure that applies to all of us. So the hope, is that by opti­mis­ing our task man­age­ment, we can reduce stress, and improve effi­cien­cy.

As ever, and per­haps espe­cial­ly so when you are ‘opti­mis­ing some­thing’, any­thing worth doing, is worth doing well…

A little background..

I rely fair­ly heav­i­ly on task man­age­ment, for work, and also for all the mun­dane tasks that lit­ter life. Every­thing from emails, to gro­ceries, to bills — there’s an awful lot in mod­ern life I don’t want on my mind until it needs to be.

In my unop­ti­mised (or unen­light­ened) state, I man­aged all of this with a few dis­parate apps, name­ly Google Cal­en­dar, Notes (a stock Android app inher­it­ed from an old Sony Xpe­ria, clum­si­ly push­ing notes to…) Ever­note, and Wun­derlist — but none of this was con­nect­ed or synced, and the whole thing still relied on me to man­u­al­ly update, main­tain, and check reg­u­lar­ly.

Fur­ther, the set­up at work was depen­dent on the needs/preferences of the team — main­ly a Slack/Trel­lo set­up. Whilst I want to main­tain some lev­el of work/home task inte­gra­tion, what I real­ly want­ed was for my work and home life to be dis­tinct (but with the option to push the more impor­tant things, such as con­fer­ences and events, to Google cal­en­dar).

What does optimised even mean?

I’ve tried to pin down a few ele­ments that I think make a good opti­mised task man­age­ment stack.

Minimal maintenance, effort, and time required for upkeep.

The main rea­son any­one real­ly both­ers to opti­mise their task man­age­ment! Any nec­es­sary user input should require the least pos­si­ble amount of inter­ac­tion, and any­thing that can be auto­mat­ed, should be.

All functional requirements are fulfilled.

No mat­ter how many tools it takes, you’ll nev­er feel com­plete­ly sat­is­fied if you’ve had to com­pro­mise on your require­ments pure­ly because of the inbuilt lim­i­ta­tions of a par­tic­u­lar piece of soft­ware. Prac­ti­cal­ly, this means your stack should be inte­grat­ed across all your devices, if applic­a­ble, your teams or project col­lab­o­ra­tors, with tasks, reminders, check­lists — just about every­thing in sync!

Scalability and room for growth.

Yes, needs can and will change, but your stack should allow you to build on the con­cept with plen­ty of room for growth.

No more complicated than it needs to be.

Less is more.

My task management stack…

For those of you who are inter­est­ed, here’s what I’ve cur­rent­ly got oper­a­tional:

(Excuse the deliv­ery! Hap­py to spec this up in a flow chart if there is inter­est…)

And in a prac­ti­cal sense, here are the main uses:

• Take notes in Google Keep (online or offline).
  • Any of these can be ‘ele­vat­ed’ to task sta­tus by set­ting a reminder or due date — at which point it is pushed to Google cal­en­dar.
• Google Cal­en­dar serves an over­all view of every­thing across weeks or months.
• Trel­lo for a more in-depth view of projects, tasks, mov­ing parts.
• Wun­derlist for a view of the day-to-day.

What defines your task management stack?

Every­one will have their own needs and require­ments from their task man­age­ment. Mine won’t be the most inno­v­a­tive, but what it does pro­vide is a intu­itive­ness and ease of use.

I’ve become accus­tomed to jot­ting stuff down as notes as they come to me, and with Google Keep that now feeds into my over­all work­flow (with the option to keep stuff as notes, by not set­ting a reminder or due date).

Com­bined with Wun­derlist’s nat­ur­al lan­guage recog­ni­tion for smart due dates, I can now set a reminder in Cal­en­dar, or Keep: a sim­ple line such as such as “renew car insur­ance on April 1st”, and that will push/sync with Wun­derlist (which man­ages my reminders across devices).

For my per­son­al needs, this is ‘opti­mised’ because it let’s me use my apps intu­itive­ly, as I always have, ful­fills the four cri­te­ria for opti­mi­sa­tion out­lined above… And goes on to mould that into a flex­i­ble work­flow that min­imis­es effort and deci­sion mak­ing.

Verdict (was it worth it?)…

I’m cur­rent­ly a week in… and I’ve hon­est­ly found it very refresh­ing hav­ing a low main­te­nance sys­tem to man­age my tasks. Work­ing in SEO and mar­ket­ing so often hinges upon effec­tive team, and task man­age­ment. It’s a indus­try that requires good co-ordi­na­tion of teams, peo­ple, and man­age­ment of many mov­ing parts. And… when things are tick­ing along seam­less­ly, it can give great results.

It’s all the more rea­son to get every­thing work­ing seam­less­ly and in sync.

Do you have a task man­age­ment stack? What qual­i­ties or needs did you build yours around?