Task Management – Task Tracking

As I mentioned before, Tasks has its share of warts, but it seems to work well enough for me at the moment. In keeping with the GTD tradition, I split my tasks into two categories — projects and actions. Tasks does not have the concept of projects; it only has the concept of tasks. However, I can assign sub-tasks to a task. Additionally, I assign a tag of my choice to a task. So, I combine those to features to give me project support:

• A project is defined as: a root-level task that is tagged with ‘project’ OR a root-level task that is tagged with ‘someday’
• An action is defined as: either a sub-task of a project OR a root-level task that is not tagged with ‘project’ or ‘someday’ and has a date assigned to it.

I use these conventions to help me do my weekly review every Sunday morning. First, I scan the actions associated with my projects and try to schedule actions for the upcoming week. Next, I scan my someday projects and decide whether I want to promote them to projects or not. This all works fairly well in Tasks because I can look at my tasks by tag.

On a daily basis, I tend to heavily use the Upcoming screen in Tasks. The upcoming screen nicely breaks down in Overdue tasks, Due Today tasks, and Due within 7 Days tasks. So, at any point, I can see what I need to get done that day and in the near future. If, in some strange twist of fate, I run out of tasks to work on that are either overdue or due that day, I fall back to tags again. All of my actions are tagged with a context like ‘home’, ‘work’, ‘web’, ‘errands’, etc. When nothing else is pressing, I check the tag for the appropriate context I am in and try to see if there is anything that I have the energy to work on. If so, I work on that. Otherwise, I can rest.

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