Digital Chaos Control

Tag: wunderlist

  • How to Stay on Target with Your Goals

    How to Stay on Target with Your Goals

    Task Manager for Your Goals

    What is productivity?

    Productivity means performing on target according to your goals and deadlines. Let’s say your goal is to create a social media presence and have twenty followers. You’ll need to set a deadline to achieve that goal, break it down into achievable tasks, and assign a due date for each task.

    If you’re working unproductively, you won’t meet your goals by the deadline. This results in missed opportunities, loss of income, and perhaps a drop in confidence.

    There are many reasons for missing your deadlines, including unexpected obstacles, distractions, and unproductive employees. But you can mitigate the risk by making sure that you have good productivity tools in place.

    Start by setting up your system.

    You need:

    • Task management or project management software
    • Documented goals and deadlines
    • Activity sets for each goal
    • Due dates for each task with reminders

     
    Wunderlist goals and tasks manager

     

    Here’s my blog post on my preferred task manager called Wunderlist: Task Management for the Super Efficient. For project management, I like Insightly for ease of use, others prefer Asana or Basecamp.

    The next step after setting up your system is to determine your best method for working productively on a single task.

    This includes considering your work layout and your most productive time of day. Also consider limiting distractions during your work time by turning off notifications. Start by reading my blog post here about “perceived” productivity: How to Remain Productive.

    One productivity method is “Getting Things Done”. I’ve mentioned this in previous blog posts. Here’s a post about this and other methods for productivity: The Busy Human’s Guide to the Best Productivity Systems.

    As you’re working toward your goals, you will not only have to deal with distractions, you will also have to deal with shifting priorities.

    Let’s say, for example, that after reaching 10 followers on social media, all 10 are requesting a consultation or more information. These are new tasks that you have to integrate into your system.

    Do the following at least weekly:

    • Review your deadlines
    • Analyze your productivity and the factors affecting it
    • make adjustments

     

    Gantt Chart for Goals
     
    The white board is the traditional system for making a visual representation of a project. As we moved into digital tools for project management, the Gantt chart (a type of bar chart) became popular. It was sometimes printed out and displayed to show the project progress.

    These days, these methods have been replaced with methods that recognize the shifting priorities of projects.

    Teams have daily meetings run by project managers. They move post-it notes around that represent tasks.

    Trello goals and tasks management

    There are now project management tools that use a more visual method. One example is Trello. Trello implements something called a “Kaban” board. It puts your task cards into columns so that you can arrange your tasks by lists.

    An example might be: Column one: “This week”, Column two: “Today”, Column three: “Done”. You can easily move task cards between columns.

    Whatever your working style is, once you’ve got the right systems and the right tools in place, you’ll be able to reach your goals consistently.

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  • How to Integrate Email with Task Management

    How to Integrate Email with Task Management

    Staying on top of email chaos is not easy.

    Even after you’ve followed the steps to manage your email inbox (see my blog post here: 4 Steps to Becoming More Responsive ), you still need to “deal with” those emails that require a follow-up task. How do you make sure that you get those done, and that they don’t get lost in the daily shuffle?

    The easiest way is to have a daily routine to review and act on those emails. If you flag the most important emails, you can sort your inbox by flag. You can then review those emails daily and then delete them or archive them as you finish your follow-ups.

    However, a more efficient way is to merge your email with a task management system. Your emails will then become integrated with your daily to-do list.

    If you’re an Outlook user, then you can use the built-in Outlook task manager.

    Outlook Flag for TaskFlagging an email in Outlook actually assigns a follow-up task. If your email account is a POP account, this is pretty straightforward: open the email and select a flag for Today, Tomorrow, Next Week, etc.  If your email account is an IMAP account, you have only the option of a flag with no follow-up date. You’ll have to drag the email to Tasks (in your sidebar) and then assign a due date.

    If you use Mac mail, you can drag an email to your Reminders list.

    Apple Reminders

    Click on the “i” at the right of the reminder, and then choose the day that you want to be reminded on.

    If you’re a Gmail user, you can create a Google reminder from an email.

    Gmail Add to TaskOpen the email, click on “More”, and then select “Add to Tasks”. Your Tasks window will open in the bottom right-hand corner. You can then click on the arrow next to your new task to give it a due date. (If you use the Google Inbox app on your mobile device, then see my blog post here: How to Manage Your Gmail Inbox).

    You can also integrate your email with dedicated task managers such as Wunderlist.

    Here’s how it works with Wunderlist: when you’re running the app on your device and signed into your Wunderlist account, you can send emails to your Wunderlist Inbox by forwarding to me@wunderlist.com. Once the email is in your Wunderlist Inbox, you can give it a due date.

    If you’re keeping your to-do list in Evernote, then I suggest creating an Evernote Notebook.

    You could call it “My Tasks”, and then you can then forward emails into that notebook. (You find your Evernote email address by going to “Account Info”.) When you forward an email to your Evernote email address, you can specify a notebook by adding “@<notebook name>” to the subject line. For example, if you forward an email titled “Request for more information”, you would add your “My Tasks” notebook name to that title, so: “Request for more information @My Tasks”. If you’d like to tag the email, also add “#<tag>” to the subject line. You can then go to your Evernote app and assign a due date.

    Many of us like to use our email inbox as a todo list. It’s possible to do this, particularly by using flags to prioritize, but it’s more efficient to have all of your to-dos in one place, including emails that you need to follow up on.

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