Yesterday we talked about my morning routines in the breakfast room. Today we leave the house and head to the office to see what my routine is there.
This one isn’t so much building as sharing what actually works. For about 30 years I’ve been working in jobs that required task management and always felt a bit like I was swept along by the current of whatever others asked me to do. I might have some tasks I had to work on all the time and other tasks that didn’t scream at me to do them until one day they were so urgent I couldn’t avoid them. I’d choose tasks not quite randomly but mostly in terms of what I remembered or wrote down and what sounded interesting at the time.
But now I’m on one of the most fast paced jobs I’ve ever been on. My role for the past several years has been in quality assurance, reviewing everything from test plans, to test results to reports, plans and change requests. At the moment I have about 30 different active tasks going on. Some of them are my responsibility, others are waiting for someone else. Up until a few months back I would track what I had to do based on what was on my desk or document management system review inbox: I had a vague idea of what else was out there and what might come back to be dealt with later but didn’t write it down. I’d figure it out when it came back.
This worked fine but I often felt off balance. Some days everything came back at once or there was a task I forgot about until the last minute and rushed to catch up on.
I tried a few different methods and for a while settled on Trello which I used to organize all my to-do’s by stakeholder with due dates on the cards. It worked fine but seemed to be missing something. I didn’t have any idea of how things were progressing. This gave me the idea for what I’m calling “life cycle task management” (probably there’s a real name – anyone know what it is?).
Life Cycle Task Management
In my job, every document must be approved by a group of people. This means there’s usually an electronic or manual “review” workflow followed by an approval one. During the review everyone provides their comments and issues to be addressed. Those issues could be how something is explained, correcting documentation errors or test failures that were not noticed. Then the document returns, the corrections are verified and if everyone’s happy we all sign and the task is done. Here’s how I’ve implemented it into my routine. Your job may be different but I am almost certain you have your own task life cycle to deal with and you can adapt this to your own needs.
When I come in in the morning, I open my Review Tasks Clickup board, my Email and Teams.
Any new reviews are added as a card on this board in “Review Queue”. I have card types created for each type of document I review. I use this for reporting and seeing where my time is going.
This shows a report task. The name of the task includes the document number/title. Description is often left blank as the title is enough. I also use fields for due date, priority, tags (which I use to capture which department is asking for the work – so I can determine who I’m doing the most work for), contact (who sent it to me), The date it was received (sometimes people routinely send things late with minimal review time allowed – this captures it), link for review (where the file is), and review count (am I having to review the same thing over and over and still finding mistakes? I should review once and then it should all be fixed, ideally)
The review queue is my inbox and I sort it by priority and date and figure out from there what needs to be done. When I am doing the review, it’s in “Active Reviews”. Here’s a card there:
This is one of the things I’m working on for the automation department. It will be due on Monday with normal priority. The timer is one of the other tools I use. I don’t follow it religiously enough to use it for billing but I do use it to get a macro idea of how long I’m spending on a task. I also use it for reporting later as you’ll see. I’ve tagged it as being from the automation department and it’s a type called “NC-Pre” – an error report being pre-approved. The name of the person is blurred just like the task title (confidentiality, don’t you know). You can also see that this was given to me four days ago at 4:27 PM and has not been reviewed yet. It is also marked “TO” which is for “Todd” indicating that I’m the current owner of the task. I also use this for reporting: who is currently holding how many tasks. If someone asks “What is the status of Task A?” I can look at this and see that it’s with John in Automation.
In the card I can add details, notes, correspondence with the author, attach spreadsheets and images. I use this for any notes I need to come up to speed quickly on what I reviewed for when it comes back.
Once I finish the review I kick it over one to the right: “Author Addressing Comments”. It’s no longer my task. An automation assigns it from me to the department who sent it. It will sit there until it comes back with all of its notes waiting.
But if it’s in good shape and there are no more comments, it goes one more space to the right, “Ready to Approve”. This means that I had no further comments. I let the author know. It may still take a few days for others to review and the document to go out for approval after their updates. But this designation also means that when it comes back I will scan for changes but no more detailed review is required before approval. This significantly speeds up my approval times.
Once signed I put it in the “Complete” column where it will wait to be reported on at the end of the week before archiving.
There’s one more column “Waiting/Blocked” – some things are, for various reasons, blocked or on hold. Maybe there’s a pause on that project. There’s stuff to be done – maybe a repair or retest – and it can wait there.
In all cases, unless it is in Review Queue or Active Reviews, it’s not something I have to pay attention to now and won’t give me any reminders – I don’t even “own” the task. But because I might need to check its status for someone else, it lives there until its life ends in the complete column.
In my line of work, especially on this project, where I have many “customers” and lots of competing priorities, a system like this is essential for me to quickly prioritize my activities and get them done. So far it’s noticeably improved my priority – to the point that colleagues and management have commented on it.
Reporting:
At the end of the week I prepare a list of everything I worked on. It’s shared with my client as when they go for funding they need to be able to easily update senior management on why I need to be there.
Here I have two reports. The easiest one is just a list of everything I worked on. This is just a table: the task, who it was for and its status. If I worked on it for more than a couple of min it is on the list. Making this report is automatic but I review it as I prepare it for sharing and it has another nice side effect. At the end of the week I get a bunch of satisfaction from seeing all the things I did.
I also share a number of pie graphs: What departments am I helping by percentage, what types of deliverables am I reviewing, and who am I currently waiting for (or maybe it’s in my inbox). My favourite, though, is this one:
This gives me a clear view of what I’m working on and if I’m waiting for anything. As you can see, there are a ton of documents out that are going to be coming back to me hopefully soon. But at the moment, I have one review in progress. I also show a small piece which is “Task in Progress” which relates to a more traditional task list I also maintain in Clickup on a different board for things I’m preparing myself.
This also gives me an idea of when I have bandwidth to take more on and how much or how long I can do it. If you look at my inbox right now there isn’t much and you’d think that maybe I could take on a few more things but that big “Author addressing comments” piece is just there waiting to get me when I get complacent. So I have to pace myself.
And that’s basically it, when task requests come in, before I do anything with them I log them and then follow them through the system. There is extra work logging and tracking each status as time goes on. However I save so much time and am able to know exactly what is happening so the effort is paid off many times over.
What are your most useful office routines?
