I'm having a real hard time organizing and prioritizing the stuff I have to do at work.
I've tried various methods and I didn't really stick with any one of them, probably because of my laziness. Nevertheless, that laziness is what I want to fight, so I have to try and figure out something that works! This post is just so I can organize my ideas to try to figure out why the tools and methods I try are not working.
Here are some of the things I've tried:
Trello It's great: beautiful, powerful and at the same time simple. With a mobile app. But I tend to stop adding stuff to it and looking at it. Maybe because it doesn't integrate with Outlook, and my day is mainly decided by what mails I get. Having to transpose those requests I get in the mail to Trello is a PITA. What I like about Trello is that tasks don't have a fixed time slot, and that's nice, because everyday there's something urgent that comes up and my neat schedule goes bonkers.
Outlook Calendar Outlook is enforced by the company, so there is no way to get rid of it. But besides the meetings I have to attend, I tried to add the other stuff I have to do as an outlook calender entry. It doesn't work. Most of the time, I'm busy with something else at the time I set for the the entry, and I have to reorder my calender when that time comes up so I don't forget it...
Outlook Tasks I use the tasks in Outlook like a mini Trello. But it lacks most of the stuff that makes Trello great: There are no lists, it's tiny and ugly, you can inadvertently click a flag and the task just disappears. One thing that I like, though, is the fact that I can assign a task to an email. That's a really great feature.
Pomodoro Timer This is just so I can manage my time and stop iprocrastinating. The app is very nice but, for me, It doesn't always work because sometimes I ignore the breaks or I forget to start a new pomodoro.
Evernote One of the things I've managed to stick to is to write everything I do in a text file in Evernote. That is very useful when I have some doubt on something I did, but it doesn't help me organize what I have to do.
The company provides a project management tool (Artemis 7) to log some of the stuff I do everyday, particularly the things that are accountable and related to projects. The thing is, Artemis is only usable for a subset of my tasks, and because of that, I can't rely on it to manage my work. Also, it is very bad, as in "only works in IE" bad.
I would really, really love that the company was using something like Asana so I could manage all my work in one place.