I don’t know about you, but I always seem to have a long list of Things to do. Managing my time and task list has always been bit of a challenge. Meeting deadlines and making sure that a ball is not dropped is part of my everyday life. I am a fan of the GTD principle so tend to write every thing down that needs to happen. As my technology started to evolve, writing things down became emailing tasks through to myself. Needless to say I started getting a lot more email.
I am very deadline orientated and often need to know exactly where I am with each project I am working on. I have often tried different task management systems but found that every system didn’t provide for the flexibility I needed in managing my tasks.
The other thing to remember is that I moved over to the Mac Yuppie lifestyle about 2 years ago so i needed something that would compliment the apple logic.
Things provides the ultimate flexibility in task management while keeping to a GTD process that does not allow for things to get lost.
The Inbox
Throw all your tasks into an “Inbox” and then batch your task management time. Once your tasks are collected in the inbox you are able to re-assign them into ‘area’s’, projects and even scheduled and recurring tasks.
Tagging helps batching
My favourite aspect about things is the tagging system, this could be because I enjoy and frequently use applications like del.icio.us. By tagging items with specific keywords I am able to batch all similar tasks across multiple projects together which saves me set up time and searching time for similar tasks.
Example: Every project that I complete needs to be invoiced, by tagging each task that involves invoicing the client, I am able to search the tag “invoice.” With those search results I am able to see every client that I need to invoice. So I only have to open my accounts programme once, instead of a few times a day for separate projects.
Check it out!
But don’t let me tell you more. See for yourself on the Culture Code website.
PS: iPhone
Oh, and they have developed an iPhone app which just makes my life even easier and I can add to and assign my task list / inbox from anywhere.
