Productivity workflow for busy Project / Product managers (part 1 – Todoist)
Introduction
I wanted to document my work process for a long time, as this is something that I came up with by myself, and I believe it could benefit a lot of knowledge workers. Furthermore, after checking several workflows of “productivity gurus” I was amazed at how inefficiently they use the task management software and how trivial their tasks are (if I had such low complexity of work, I wouldn’t bother with a task management system at all!). My line of work is tech project management, and my system is battle-proven during my hottest periods of work where I worked crazy overtime.
Note that this workflow is described with the personal manager’s tasks / reminders in mind. For all the team tasks, I use Jira and other project management software.
I use Todoist for my to-do’s and other stuff. I love it for being inexpensive, very mature in terms of feature set, and fast / reliable. The beauty of it is that you can set it up with any degree of complexity depending on your needs.
Let’s go through each aspect of my to-do system in more detail.
Projects
Projects are like directories for tasks. Hence I have a Todoist project for every work project that I work with, plus a General project for other work stuff related to my organization. Inside each project, I have the following sections (groups of tasks):
- To do – all the stuff where I have to take action, my actual tasks. For example, create a requirements specification, prepare for a meeting, review a deliverable;
- Non-actionable reminders – things that I have to keep in mind on a certain date, or random stuff that I need to discuss with my teams or stakeholders. For example, approved days off of my team members, ideas that need further elaboration, randomized agenda items, and so on;
- Commitments from other people – if I verbally ask someone to do something minor (not a Jira task) or expect a reply from someone, I record it in this section with a due date. When the due time of such a task comes, I check whether I got the required reply / completion notice and remind the person, if necessary;
- Think – complicated multi-faceted issues that require some focus time and appropriate energy levels / clarity of mind.
- Archive – just a dump of tasks that contain some information that I may need at some point in the future. Tasks in this section never have a due date. So during the day, if I see or hear something that I need to keep track of, I log it as a Todoist task immediately. It could sound complicated, but this process doesn’t really take a lot of time or mental capacity, thanks to shortcuts and Inbox (more about it later).
Task details
To navigate the hundreds of tasks across all my projects, I use Due Dates – it is the day when I have to start doing a task (not when it needs to be done).
Also, there are 4 levels of priority in Todoist – I assign a priority only to the mission-critical tasks, to make sure they are highlighted and not buried in the list of other to-do’s.
One great Todoist feature that I use to stay on top of things is recurring tasks – stuff that repeats on a regular basis, for example, preparing agendas for meetings, some end-of-the-month chores, weekly reports, etc. I have tasks that recur weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly.
Another cool thing is sub-tasks, so I can decompose large undertakings into a plan with bite-sized activities that I can attack more effectively (it really helps to avoid procrastination, starting a 15-30 min sub-task is much easier than an entire 4-hour task).
Different task views
There are several out-of-the-box task directories. The first one is Inbox – this is a default place to quickly unload your thoughts into (Q shortcut comes very handy). For example, when I am in a meeting and need to put something into Todoist without distracting myself too much, it goes to Inbox. Do not worry about the details such as priority, due dates, and detailed descriptions – all this stuff will be added later when you categorize the inbox.
My other favorite thing is the Today view – this is the default view during the workday, where I spend 90% of the time. As you could’ve guessed, all the tasks that are due today are listed there. I also have 'Tomorrow' and 'This week' filters to quickly check what is planned in the coming work days.
You can customize the view of any project or task group: the layout, sorting, grouping, etc.
The process
Usually, I review, categorize, and prioritize my Today tasks in the mornings (I have an hour of focus time reserved in the calendar every day). The entire process doesn’t take more than 2-10 minutes per project. If things get chaotic, I can additionally spend a minute or two tidying things up during the workday.
In most cases, the agenda for my meetings for the day is ready after I scan the Non-actionable reminders section – everything is already there.
If there are more due tasks than I can handle during the workday (90% of the time), I just change the due date for less important stuff according to my priorities. If I end up with tasks that get postponed for a couple of weeks, then I remove their due date completely, and this way, they fall into the unofficial “Not urgent, not important” bucket (to be worked on once all the tasks with due dates are complete).
I review all the tasks without due dates every couple of months and sometimes delete them because some stuff becomes no longer relevant (we all have to prioritize ruthlessly at times).
I also like to end my workday with a clear Today view – it provides some sort of accomplishment and reduces anxiety.
Other
You should be aware that Todoist recognizes natural language for due dates, for example, today, or tomorrow, or end of month. I also heavily rely on every! type of recurring filter (when tasks recur based on the last completion date, and not fixed calendar dates).
Reminders are also a useful feature, you can get a notification about a specific task at a preferred time (my only use case for this is the reminder to start meeting recording, somehow I keep forgetting it).
As for Productivity goals (Todoist’s gamification system), I have it turned off as it just distracts me and doesn’t make much sense.