Maybe you’re the sort of person who sits down at their desk for 8 hours solid and hammers out as much as possible.

Maybe you use the Pomodoro method or your own task management techniques.

I don’t know what sort of person I am yet.

I used to give it no thought — wake up, lob a coffee down my throat, sit down and start typing.

Lately, my tasks are harder to define and I find myself having trouble with time management and prioritizing.

Right now I’m using Pomello, a Pomodoro timer that lives in Trello and times my work on each card. Click here to get it.

Tomorrow I’ll probably be sick of it and defiantly hammering on the keyboard until it’s time to sleep…

In my seemingly neverending quest to get shit done, I’ve seen a ton of strange methods and lists. And, let me tell you, working at Process Street — a task management system for businesses — I’m making myself practice what I preach.

Here are some of the task management techniques I’ve come across.
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Motivation is a massive factor to your productivity, but you can’t stay motivated without inspiration.

Hell, success comes from surrounding yourself with people who are better than you, so why not learn from the top of the heap?

To help, we at Process Street have put together 30 productivity quotes from the best of the best.

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It sounds like a miracle pill or silver bullet. Polyphasic sleep. How to rest for two hours a day with no ill effects.

Imagine everything you could get done with that free time! No more rushing for work deadlines, wishing you could read that book that’s been haunting your bag for a year, or trying to find time to just relax.

Unfortunately, as with most miracle solutions, polyphasic sleep has major associated health risks and little in the way of proven benefits. Most of its good press is down to urban myths and overestimating the positives.

We don’t sleep just for the hell of it – humans need solid rest to process the information gained in waking hours and properly order memories. Unfortunately, the idea of periodically napping throughout the day to replace regular sleep is consistently brought up in productivity discussions.

“An hour on the dream machine keeps me sane.” – Gustav Graves, a literal James Bond villain, talking about his sleep schedule and glowing light mask… thing

The idea is nothing if not persistent, however, and so below we’ll dive into the theory behind polyphasic sleep, the alternative sleeping schedules you can try, and what the best way to get more out of your day is.

Let’s get started.

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The most productive people on Earth aren’t superheroes. They have the same amount of hours in their day as you do, and often find ways to work far fewer hours, too. How do they do it?

When I was struggling to stay on top of my new responsibilities, I was asking the same question. Over time, I discovered task management techniques, to-do list apps and how to stay off Twitter to focus on work that matters.

I’m writing this task management guide because I want to share with you what I’ve learned since being thrown from office grunt work to the hectic life of a startup employee.

Over the next few chapters, I’ll be writing a huge guide to task management that will help you write your to-do list, stay on top of your workload and get more done.

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It’s easy to wake up, check the tasks marked for today and get stuck in with your most urgent and important duty. What’s harder is taking a big picture look at your task list. Who can be bothered with that? Surely that’s an hour you’ll never get back?

Nope!

You’ve got a bunch of tasks marked for later, or pending someone else’s actions. So, when’s ‘someday’? What’s waiting the next action?

You can be so focused on putting out fires and setting priorities that you leave half of your tasks sitting somewhere out of sight, which is the sort of behavior that stops you from hitting your goals and finally getting round to the work that matters.

With a little help from GTD, and inspiration from a number of task management systems, I’ve put together a quick, actionable guide on carrying out a weekly review on your productivity. Do this every week, and you’re sure to stay on top of your game.

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A book about disasters, human error and a simple tool that could well be the answer

Surely we don’t need any more bureaucracy, do we? Writer and surgeon Atul Gawande says yes, in fact we do. Box-checking and form-filling are often seen as the direct opposites of efficiency, but how many skyscrapers just tumble down out of the blue? Not very many, and The Checklist Manifesto explains why. It all comes down to recognizing that checklists are a powerful weapon in the fight against human error. In a series of anecdotes/case studies spanning from Gawande’s familiar operating theater to the secretive world of venture capitalism, the author makes rock-solid arguments in quick succession about why we all need more checklists in our lives. But not just any old checklists…

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In the last chapter, I showed you how to get tasks out of your head and into your notebook.

In this post I’m going to answer some questions you might be having about what to do next, and show you how to make a to-do list even when you’re short on time.

• Where do I put my tasks?
• How do I break them down?
• How do I word them?
• What resources do I need to keep alongside them?

Read on to find out the answers.

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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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After I accidentally threw my Macbook out of a moving car and couldn’t afford another one, I’d suffered with a Windows machine for 2 years before getting a Mac again.

I made a solemn oath never to use Windows software again, but last week, I did something that really shocked me.

I enjoyed using a Microsoft product. I enjoyed using it even when there was a viable non-Microsoft alternative.

Then why, I ask myself, am I submitting myself to a Microsoft product when I don’t have to ever see Microsoft again?

Two reasons:

1. I have made a terrible mess of my Evernote.
2. OneNote is actually quite good.

In this post, I’m going to share my experiences with Evernote and OneNote, compare them, and give you an idea of how I get value out of them as a writer and note-hoarder spending all my waking hours on a laptop.

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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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