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by OrionSeven 3769 days ago
I use Trello.com (and have for about 4 years) for tracking all of my work tasks (from coding tasks, to making sure I reply to someone, misc things, and more). If you're not familiar with Trello, think of an online kan-ban board. They have a great web app, but also iOS and Android apps.

I have Trello organized with the following boards (from left to right on the screen):

"Thing to Do" - This is really my inbox. While I tend to make the cards in the list they need to go, if I just don't know I place it here. About once a month I go through it to make sure nothing has fallen off my radar that shouldn't or more importantly see if I can just delete it because it doesn't matter.

"Priority Tasks" - These are bigger tasks that I know are things that need to get done as workflow permits.

"Doing" - What I'm currently working on. Usually 5-10 items depending on dependencies.

"Dated Boards" - At the start of each week I create a new board with the title of being just the date. All tasks that I complete that week go onto that board. For really long tasks I may copy a card and keep it in "Doing" but put a copy in that weeks board.

Trello also has card labels, think colored flags to identify things quickly. I always have the following labels:

Red - Critical, e.g. an emergency task that takes priority over all things. Orange - Urgent, can wait, but not long. Yellow - Time sensitive, I don't always use the date feature on Trello cards, so I use the yellow label for things that need to be done by a set date Blue - Big tasks or Big wins. I want to be able to find in past week when I had a big win. Green - Interdepartmental dependency, either someone else needs this from me or I need something from someone else.

At my current job I can see back nearly three years what I did week to week. I can quickly search to see when something was done, or browse it. But more importantly it's easy to make a Trello card and once it's in Trello I can easily organize my time and tasks.

1 comments

One other thing I really like about Trello is it's extremely flexible so you can tweak how you use it over time as you use it more.
I was also big on Trello for a good while, but wanted to come away from third-party, slightly bloaty services, so made a vertical kanban board in a plain text file. Timestamps, autocompletion, tagging etc. all present, synced to a rpi server for external access.

For tasks or events with dates I have a plaintext calendar. Similar setup there.

Have a look here: https://github.com/luxpir/plaintext-productivity

Not everyone's cup of tea, but mentions why it was developed over org-mode in the linked post.