Somebody asks what you're working on and you don't look at the project board. You look at a note on your desk, or you just answer from memory, because the board was never built to tell you that.
The board is for the team. What you owe this week is a different, much shorter thing, and it deserves somewhere of its own.
The board is not your list
Open any project board and see how much of it is yours. A few cards, scattered across columns, in among forty that belong to other people.
To find your part you filter, and then you're reading a view of somebody else's structure. The board is shaped around how the work breaks down, which is right for the group and wrong for a Tuesday afternoon when you have ninety minutes and want to know what to do with them1.
Where your eight things actually come from
Watch where work reaches you for a week. Almost none of it arrives as a card.
Somebody asks in Slack. An email needs a reply by Friday. Somebody stops you after a meeting and says can you look at this. Your manager mentions something in a one-on-one. Those are commitments the moment you say yes, and not one of them is on the board yet, if it ever will be.
Keeping the list where the work lands
Which means the place you keep your list has to reach into where the asks arrive. If a promise made in Slack takes six steps to get written down, it won't get written down.
So save it right there. Turn the message into a task without leaving the conversation, and let the reminder come back in Slack too, since that's where you'll be. Same for the things you think of on the way home, where saying it out loud in the car should be enough.
What stays on the board
Leave the project on the board. Dependencies, who owns what, what's blocked, the shape of the release: all of that belongs to the team and should live in one place everybody can see.
The mistake is copying between the two. Once the same work exists as a card and as a task, you're keeping both current, and one goes stale in about a week. Keep one line on your list for what you owe next, and let the board hold the plan2.
Monday morning, both open
In practice you look at both and they answer different questions. The board tells you where the release is. Your list tells you the six things you personally promised, including the two that only exist because you said "sure" in a hallway.
Nobody ever got fired for a tidy board. They get burned by the promise made in a hallway that nobody wrote down.
Frequently asked questions
Should my work tasks live in the project tool?
- The team's work should. Your own next steps usually shouldn't, because a project board is organized around the project rather than around your day, and half of what you owe never becomes a card at all.
How do I turn a Slack message into a task?
- With 42 Todo! you save it from the message itself, without leaving the conversation, and the reminder comes back in Slack when it's due. The point is that it takes one step, because anything longer means the promise stays unwritten.
What about tasks I'm waiting on other people for?
- Keep a line for it with a date on it, worded as the thing you'll do: "chase Dana on the pricing, thursday". Then it comes back Thursday and you either chase or push it out. A separate waiting list is one more thing to check.
Can I keep work and personal on one list?
- You can, with a couple of named lists like Work and Personal so you can look at either one. Most people find one place easier than two apps, since the dentist and the client email are competing for the same afternoon anyway.
Footnotes
- Task management software and a to-do list are different things the fuller version of why the board and your list are separate products. ↩
- Why a simple to-do list beats a fancy one why keeping two copies of the same work always ends badly. ↩