My automatized task management
As a project manager working for a development agency I need to manage several tasks every day. The environment which I am working in is really dynamic and it is so easy to forget something. I am constantly receiving emails from clients and I am also in a day to day cooperation with developers and other co-workers. Every channel I use for communication generates tasks. So the question is how you can manage all these task without going insane.
I have spent a lot of time trying different things to figure that out. There is still a long way to achieve perfection but I have identified that if I want to record and resolve every task which occurs somewhere, I need to get them to one place. This way I am able to prioritize my own tasks and create my daily schedule.
To solve this I have started to automate my work by using integration tool called Zapier. The goal is to transform all the important information that requires some level of thought or response and can not be resolved in a minute into the task recorded in a To do list app (in my case Todoist).
How does it work in a real life:
- Every email I receive is either solved immediately or marked as To Do and sent by zapier to my To Do list
- Every new message on slack which requires my attention is marked with a star and sent by zapier to my To Do list
- Every note I make in Evernote during meeting is also transferred by Zapier to my To Do list
- Also a small Todoist widget is always available on my phone or laptop to record task in seconds
All of my new tasks in todoist have a deadline. I use Zapier to get the deadline date mostly from the message receive date or to create the date of the note. By doing this To do list app forces me to resolve these overdue tasks as soon as possible. In this case resolving means rescheduling and determining a real deadline for these tasks.
With this setup I can easily achieve zero email policy and I never miss a task.
