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The amount of work I have to do can, and will, get a little out of hand. Especially prioritizing what to do and when tends to get a little dicey. On any given day, I could be looking at as much as 50 – 70 tasks of varying types. Today it was an extraordinary 84 tasks. Many of them are 5-10 minute jobs while others will rip out a large chunk of my time – often an undefined amount of time since you rarely know what’ll pop up once you get started.

So what to do with all these tasks and how to get everything done in a logical, meaningful and organized way? I’m still trying to figure that one out.

There’s a ton of software that promises to manage your to do list in a way that makes it easier to plan your day / days, keeping you on your toes and reminding you when a task is overdue. While that might be good and well for someone who are doing tasks for a set amount of time, working in tech it simply doesn’t work. Scheduling something for a certain time might look good on paper, but all techies know how one task can lead to another, or the task takes longer than first anticipated. So what to do. I don’t know. So far I have only manage to make a word processor document with a complete list of unfinished tasks in the following schematic:

Date

Worker    Giver    Text                         Status
EMP A     EMP B    Set up NAS cloning           DONE
EMP F     EMP C    Firmware update server XYZ   Planned
.
.

Completed tasks get moved to a task log page, used for reporting to management every week.

So far that’s the most effective tool I’ve managed to come up with. It beats pen and paper, but not by much.

At first I thought: “There’s an app for that”, and sure enough, there are a million task management utilities for the iPhone, but common for all of them is that they will challenge your administrative skills, or at least do their best to make you spend most of your time maintaining a list and not getting anything done.

There’s got to be a better way.