I’m interested in ways that people document, prioritize and execute items they need to do. What have you found useful?
For me: I don’t particularly care about other Outlook functionality, but flagging emails and managing them in the sidebar has helped me a lot. I have it set to display only items due today, and then sorted into categories like “now,” “soon,” “pending.” If I don’t expect to get to an item today I change the due date to tomorrow or next week. Items don’t have to be based on an email either, you can just type into the sidebar text field.
When I get emails I either immediately reply, flag it for later action, or ignore, and then I drop all emails into one giant folder. If I need to find something I do it all by search.
I’ve tried other systems like gmail’s to do list, but it feels like way more friction to accomplish the same things, especially wanting to only view tasks due today, and categorizing tasks.
Likewise I’ve tried to-do-list apps, but not being able to instantly convert an email into a task, and not having documentation easily at hand when I go to perform the task makes them feel more burdensome.
Ultimately use what works for you, digital only doesn’t for me, I end up using whatever project tool the project uses (often az devops or jira) for large tasks, but I’ve kept logbooks/journals since uni using a symbol system that makes sense to me, refine it over time especially in the last 8 years or so. A star is important, ? Bubble is investigation, o is a regular task/thought, arrows for sub/related thoughts. Also like to tag my commit messages with my ticket/item number, some systems auto link them but even without, nice to have that linkage for recollection.
I’m not the best at indexing but everything is dated, memory is usually solid enough to recall the types of work I did in a period so been able to pull up past stuff pretty readily when need be. I have ADHD so found that externalised thought works well for me, I tend to spend a bit in the morning reviewing the day prior or time at the end of the day moving stuff I’ve not got to. Generally they’re notes while working, just to capture frame of mind or future ideas. I could see using markdown for the same idea, but I’ve seen suggestions that paper notes are better for retention and anecdotally I’ve found that to be true.
Has actually helped a few times for cyoa purposes, but that’s a secondary benefit to me. My email inbox is horrendous (so much advertising and spam emails for people who don’t work here anymore but were on my team so they’re forwarded to me), even my BACN filters aren’t perfect and I frankly don’t bother reading everything. Should delete or purge more often but if it’s important, I’ll read it and make a ticket.
Your symbol system is interesting. When I used to keep written to do lists I just had dots/bullets for each item, and would make a larger square around the items which took priority. What does investigation mean to you in this context?
For me, something to either research or look into later. Not a work task but either supports them it just pure interest.
Yeah it’s inspired somewhat by bullet journalling, I just found a version of it I could stick to.