Are you ever at a loss when it comes to planning your tasks? A good chunk of the time, I feel exactly like that.

That’s ok. Task management exists because planning and executing projects is hard.

Last night, I sat down with my wife and we wrote down everything we’ll need to do when we move house. It was two A4 sheets of paper before we even started breaking it down into subtasks. Two A4 sheets of paper.

The amount of items a human can hold in working memory is around 7, so when it comes to projects, of course you’re lost if you’re not planning them properly.

Don’t worry. There’s a simple way to do it, and once you’ve got that down, you’ve learnt it forever. And the start of it, just like I sat down to do last night, is writing everything down.

Here’s how to brain dump your tasks and make sense of them.

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While writing a recent article for TechCrunch about empty states in app design, I came across Inbox by Gmail — the app which rewards you with a sunny sky when you hit inbox zero.

Inbox vs Gmail: The Full Comparison

I’m probably a little late to the party, and as much as I love Gmail I feel that Inbox is a smarter and more intuitive way to process a bulging inbox.

Vinay covered why task snoozing is so powerful over on his Abstract Living blog, which made me want to try an app with the same mechanics.

If you’re anything like me and have these traits, you’re probably going to get a lot out of Inbox:

1. Around 5% of your emails warrant a reply
2. Less than 10% of your emails get opened
3. You forget to create tasks in your to-do list from emails
4. You spend too long hitting inbox zero (the very definition of ‘busy work’)
5. You find it hard to separate useful emails from trash with your current app
6. You need reminding often before you start working on a task
7. You want to see a blue, sunny sky pop up when you clear your inbox.
8. You like good things

Delightful, right?! It looks even better on the iPhone because it animates slightly. After 20 minutes of looking for a way to record my iPhone’s screen and buying some junk app which doesn’t actually do it, I’ll leave that to your imagination.

If you want more content on Google products, see the posts Google Drive Tips and Dropbox vs Google Drive.

But first, getting back on track: here’s Inbox vs Gmail (The Showdown).

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This article is a guest post from Dillon Forrest, a front end developer, startup guy and content creator. Follow him on Twitter for more posts.

If you’ve ever wondered how to attract and retain engineering talent, this post is for you.

Engineers are notoriously difficult to find, screen and onboard. Every candidate who receives your job offer has likely received several others too. And once they do accept, it’s only a matter of time before another company tries to poach them.

It’s time to ask yourself if your developers are really happy, or are your company’s development processes driving them away?

Let’s take a deep dive into the world of Daria the Developer, discussing five common workflow problems, and giving you tips on how to manage developers.

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Life loves to throw things at us from all directions. The key to staying on top of everything is having an effective schedule to keep you on track.

So how the hell do you create a system for managing your tasks, events, notes, and calendar no matter where you are?

You need to create a bullet journal.

“A full 93% [of educators] state that using their Bullet Journal… makes their lives easier or significantly easier.

As one educator noted, ‘I find it difficult to track all of my classes and schedule in any other system’.” – Todd Foutz, Educators on Bullet Journaling

We here at Process Street know how difficult it is to keep track of everything, so that’s why this post will take you through everything you need to know to create your perfect bullet journal.

You’ll learn:

• What a bullet journal is
• What you’ll need to make one
• How to create a bullet journal
• How to get the most out of it

Let’s go!

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The most useful Checklist Manifesto quotes

After publishing the Checklist Manifesto Review and following up with the Checklist Manifesto Summary, I thought it’d be fun to share the most memorable The Checklist Manifesto quotes by surgeon Atul Gawande. The book is packed full of useful knowledge, and not just from the author himself.

He interviews professionals from the man responsible for foolproof checklists given to pilots flying incredibly complex Boeing airplanes to a group of high-powered venture capitalists. All the people in the book have something in common – they want to reduce risk. And Gawande himself, like every human being with a will to survive, is no stranger to risk reduction. For him, however, it’s vitally important.

The Checklist Manifesto is the story of how this simple checklist was made.

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The following is a guest post from graphic designer and copywriter Erik Fessler.

What do you think is worse: sitting for 100 days because you didn’t know what direction to travel in, or going for 100 days down the wrong path?

Here’s the good news:

This question doesn’t matter if you have a reliable and logical process to find the right direction.

Brainstorming is the key to finding that direction, and it’s something you can implement for your team in a logical, structured way. With that in place, you can use that process as a reliable way to generate ideas, iterate upon them, and harness the power of your team’s combined creative energy to make real business change. That is, if you can build and optimize your brainstorming process…

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Screencasts are true powerhouses in team communication; they allow us here at Process Street to convey everything in a concise manner with both visual and audial cues, whilst giving the viewer a resource that they can run through as many times as they want.

Unfortunately, many teams put off using screencasts because you have to:

• Spend time recording it
• Wait for the file to export
• Wait for the video to convert
• Wait for the video to upload
• Remember you recorded a video that has now finished uploading
• Manually send it to the right team member

Whilst conversations are more likely to be forgotten or lost, their ease makes them the go-to method for communication (or, at best, a Skype call). This is a huge mistake.

Using just a couple of free screencasting apps you can record your video, spend three seconds saving it and then have it automatically sent to to the right person. Rather than waiting for your time zones to match up or the other person to reply, you can record, save, then get on with the rest of your day.
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“I’d give anything to work from home. It must be so relaxing!”

I’ve heard this kind of thing from my entire family, and with the increasing trend of remote workers it’s not surprising that people want to get in on the action.

The last 3 years of working remotely have taught me otherwise.

Yes, you get to work from anywhere, have more flexibility with your hours, and even wear whatever you want. However, remote work can be isolating, demotivating, stressful as all hell, and even physically damaging.

So, I’ve brought together all of the lessons I wish I’d been told when getting into the game, including:

• How to maintain a work/life balance without a traditional office
• Creating and sticking to your own schedule
• How to stay motivated without seeing your teammates
• Staying healthy and avoiding injuries common to remote work

Also, if you’re looking for remote work, we here at Process Street are hiring!

Check out our jobs page for more information.

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Generating and sending invoices can be a time-consuming process. A properly designed invoice helps a business get paid and provides legal protection for both parties.

Think about it, all the hours and energy you put into completing a project will have an invoice at the end of it. Invoices are the tool that provides freelancers with the ability to receive income. That’s why we over at Process Street sat down and thought up a way to make getting paid even easier; a template which serves as a custom invoice generator.

Never again worry about charging your clients the wrong amount, or even sending them an invoice with an outdated logo or set of information. All you need to do is plug your information into this template and away you go!

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Pinch analysis is a difficult topic to talk about, as it both has widely applicable techniques which can reduce the need for external resources, but it’s traditionally very complicated and used in a limited business sector.

That’s why today I’ll be breaking down the topic and showing how the principles behind it can be used across any and all disciplines.

You don’t have to be a thermodynamics buff to understand this; it all comes down to analyzing what you have, what by-products your processes create, and whether you can use those by-products to your advantage.

By doing this, traditional pinch analysis is able to typically result in energy savings of 10-35% – that’s a third less energy you need to generate or import to carry out your processes.

Lets’ get stuck in.
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