the rare productivity post these days
Tools
I moved a bunch of work projects and tasks into a personal JIRA
tracker with a board view. It works fine: I can keep track of the stuff
that needs a little more focus and takes a few steps, and I can easily
delegate things to my managers and leads, who all manage their teams in
JIRA. They link whatever tasks or epics my tickets spawn, and I can tell
what's going on with my stuff without watching issues on several other
boards.
I did it because Things was becoming a roach motel of tasks, and I was over the overhead of getting things into Things then getting them back out again for someone else's consumption, then keeping track between systems. I don't really have a problem with Things—I like how it sort of flexes up and down depending on my willingness to engage with a task tool—and I expect it will continue to be what I use for personal stuff.
That left me with the work-related tasks that are trivial, "do soonish," kinds of things, and things I don't want my staff to get distracted by in my JIRA tracker. So I'm just using Google Tasks: We're a Google shop, so it's right there and it makes it easy to turn Gmail messages into tasks. I especially like how it's easy to make tentative work blocks in my Google Calendar when I'm plotting out my day: I can drag the tasks into my free time, where they'll remind me when I'm coming out of a meeting and figuring out what's next.
And I guess I really like the idea of all my work things living places that are plainly work systems. This Friday, being the first Friday of the quarter, is a balance day. It'll be nice to sit down at my desk, open up Things, and just have my personal projects in there.
I guess that the move into JIRA left me with one other category besides "little things on virtual slips of paper," which is big directional things it is foolish to try to get into JIRA before you've really thought them through. For that I have RFCs. I keep a template for those in Google Drive, and even if I don't necessarily circulate the RFC I like to use them, because the format puts me in a certain mode that is structured enough to help me stay on task, but loose enough that I can do whatever I want in the broad sections. Plus, the exercise of filling in the DACI I have at the top of my template helps me visualize the people who'll be consuming what I come up with.
I feel happy that I just sort of stumbled into this set of tools. It seemed organic and not overthought to arrive here. There's not a lot to play with or tweak or fiddle with because I'm not familiar enough with JIRA to do much with it, and I don't need much the way I'm using it. Google Tasks could have been Apple Reminders or any other of a long list of simple list tools. It's cool that it has integrations with Gmail and Calendar, but it could have not had those things and it'd be fine for its purpose. It all comes together in such a way that I can say "well, what's next" and keep going.