How I get things done

Newton for work email

I live in the Inbox. All my mails are in inbox. No archiving. No filing.

I make sure all incoming mails are read. At any given time, I want to be ‘Unread Zero’.

If it’s a mail that I have to get back later, I ‘star’ it. Sometimes I star mails from the Inbox or from the notification itself, when the content of the mail is clear from the subject (Eg. a Help Desk ticket notification). I have the ‘Mark as read when email is starred’ option turned-on.

If there are still mails left that I don’t have to necessarily read (Eg. some boring internal reports), I mark them all as read in one shot. I use Newton’s ‘Cmd+Shift+U’ shortcut to do this.

Once I have my set of ‘read+starred’ mails I have to act on or read in detail for the day, I switch to the ‘Starred filter’ in Inbox.

After I’m done with a starred mail, I unstar it. This is a very important step. I make sure that I don’t have more than 10 starred mails at any given point. When all my mails are unstarred, I’m done with emailing for the day.

If there’s a mail that I wont be able to reply in 2 days, I snooze it. So that I can deal with it afresh on a later day.

Trello for work tasks

All my work tasks are in Trello. If an email contains a task, it’s added to Trello and is tracked there. Trello is one of the pinned tabs on Chrome, when I’m at work.

I have 3 lists — To do, Doing and Done.

When I have an idea or when I get a new task to work, it goes to ‘To do’.

When I’m ready to work on it, it’s moved to ‘Doing’.

When it’s done, it’s moved to ‘Done’

Tasks for personal tasks

Tasks is not the best looking app, but it has everything I need in a very straight forward interface. Nothing fancy. Just the most essential features, the way I like it. When the team behind this app joined Google and stopped development, I tried many other apps but I always came back to Tasks. All my immediate tasks are added here and they always have a due date so that I get reminded.

Tasks syncs with Gmail Tasks, which is a bonus.

Google Calendar for recurring tasks

Tasks that are recurring in nature or for a far off date, go into Calendar. This way I can keep my ‘Tasks list’ sane. It would have been perfect if Google Calendar could add an event to the Tasks app on the due date. But sadly that’s not possible. Luckily calendar notifications on Newton android app are designed to treat events as tasks and not go away until they are dismissed.

Keep for notes

I forget things easily. So everything that I have to remember is saved in Google Keep. I used Evernote for this before, but it became too bloated and I moved to a more straight forward app, Keep. Keep has its quirks but right now they are things that I can live with.

My shopping list is also on Keep. It’s shared with my wife so that she can also add/remove things in it.

Yes, I’m pretty organised, but it’s only because I tend to forget a lot. These apps and some discipline help me be on top of things.

How do you get things done?