As I mentioned in my last post, I’m listening to feedback and getting back to writing about what I know and can share on Enter Venture.  While writing this post, in fact, I realized just how far I’d strayed from what it is I do best.  How on earth could I have never talked about my obsession with process?

I’m obsessed with process.  It’s impossible for me to work without thinking about how to turn 10 steps into 3, without figuring out how to do things faster, simpler.

Recently, I found something that made my process-obsessed self feel well documented, reproducible, and, well, whole.  Recently, I discovered Tasks for Gmail.  Tasks is an amazing but simple little feature you can find by digging into the Labs portion of your Gmail account.  It allows you to easily add a task, schedule it, and check it off with a fulfilling strike-through.  It rests in the bottom right portion of your Gmail window, and when you’re not using it, you can simply keep it minimized.  Tasks are also what finally brought my work stream full circle, and, Tasks have almost single-handedly rid me of my paper “habit”.

Before Tasks, I wrote all of my major To-Dos for the day in my notebook.  Each day, I would start from the top and work down the notebook completing tasks.  In the course of this, I would scratch things out, write notes in the margins, and generally make a mess out of each and every page.  Each night, I would list out what I hadn’t accomplished and include any additional tasks for the next day, prioritizing as I went.  The problem is, it was just a little too messy.  I was never a huge fan of the hand offs between my paper process and my email / work stream management.  I was wasting paper and ink with pages of scratched out, messy lists.

Along comes Tasks, and all of a sudden, I have a fully integrated process for managing both my micro tasks — email — and my macro tasks — things bigger than emails.  Check it out:

1. As emails come in, I have filters that organize and tag my emails based on either a work stream or specific project.
2. When I come in each morning, I review every piece of email until each ones has been read — I continue this throughout the day too by monitoring a FireFox tab with Gmail to see when it throws up a (1).
3. Emails that I can respond to immediately, I do.  If not, the item is starred and finds its way onto my task list.
4. Once the inbox is clear, I review my task list, add anything that’s missing, and prioritize.
5. Next, I work on tasks in my task list from top to bottom — stopping only to keep my inbox clear.
6. As I come to an item that is associated with a starred email, I address that email and remove the star.

Voila!  When my emails are done, my tasks are done.  When my tasks are done, my emails are done too.

There are all kinds of task management tools I could have chosen — just ask my friends at Ativiti about all of them.  What’s great about Tasks, though, is that I never had to think about it. It simply arrived and became a part of my day-to-day, all without requiring a single additional username and password, without another website to keep open, and, really, without much more functionality than a basic checklist.

It’s now a part of something bigger than itself.  It’s now a part of a process.

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Posted in How To, Process, Tools Comments