Nozbe Teams is available on all the platforms - desktop with any web browser and mobile with dedicated apps for Android, iPhone and iPad. All of your team members will be able to access all projects, tasks and comments from any device and make sure everyone stays on the same page. A good to-do list can be a control room that makes it possible to keep away chaos. But it is important to know what makes a great to-do list app because that will help you find the right app. The best to-do list apps need not be complicated. It should have the following features: Make it quick to organize tasks. Aug 13, 2020 After experimenting with various tools and apps I have now set up Getting Things Done (GTD) in Outlook and To-Do, with my Outlook Inbox as my 'Inbox'. Most work-related stuff and a lot of personal stuff is coming in via e-mail anyway and there are simple ways to capture random stuff using email. Built upon an enhanced version of the game, players will find numerous significant improvements, including the addition of Skill Cards, part-time jobs, a total of five difficulty settings (ranging from the newcomer-friendly 'beginner' to the ultra-hardcore 'maniac'), and most importantly, the ability to directly control your teammates in battle. Chaos Control is a task manager based on the best principles of GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology created by David Allen. This goal-driven to-do list has been developed primarily with.
App Description
Chaos Control was created to help you manage your goals, to-do lists and tasks in both your business and personal life.
People don't usually achieve impressive results simply by being good at task management. It's the ability to set legitimate goals that makes the difference. Just write down your desired outcomes to make them real. This simple technique helps you to prioritize your goals before acting on them.
Chaos Control is a task manager based on the best ideas of GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology created by David Allen. Whether you are running a business, launching an app, working on a project or simply planning your holiday trip, Chaos Control is a perfect tool to manage your goals, juggle your priorities, and organize your tasks to get things done. And the best part is, you can handle both heavyweight project planning and simple daily routine like shopping list management in one flexible app. Also, Chaos Control is available across all major mobile and desktop platforms with seamless sync.
HERE IS HOW IT WORKS:
1) MANAGE YOUR PROJECTS
Project is a goal combined with a set of tasks you need to complete in order to achieve it. Create as many projects as you like to write down all the desired outcomes you have
2) ORGANIZE YOUR GOALS
Create unlimited number of projects and group them by category using Folders
3) USE GTD CONTEXTS
Organize tasks from different projects using flexible context lists. If you are familiar with GTD you would just love this feature
4) PLAN YOUR DAY
Set due dates for tasks and make plans for any particular day
5) USE CHAOS BOX
Put all the incoming tasks, notes and ideas into Chaos Box in order to process them later. It works similar to GTD inbox, but you can use it as a simple to-do list
6) SYNC YOUR DATA
Chaos Control works on both desktop and mobile devices. Setup an account and sync your projects across all of your devices
This app is designed with creative people in mind. Designers, writers, developers, startup founders, entrepreneurs of all kinds and pretty much anyone with ideas and desire to make them happen. We combined the power of GTD with the convenient interface to help you with:
☆ personal goal setting
☆ task management
☆ time management
☆ planning your business and personal activities
☆ building your routine
☆ handling simple to do lists, checklists and shopping lists
☆ catching your ideas and thoughts to process them later
KEY FEATURES
☆ Seamless cloud sync across all major mobile and desktop platforms
☆ GTD-inspired Projects and Contexts supplemented with Folders, sub-folders and sub-contexts
☆ Recurring tasks (daily, weekly, monthly and chosen days of the week)
☆ Chaos Box - Inbox for your unstructured tasks, notes, memos, ideas and thoughts. Great tool for staying on track inspired by GTD ideas
☆ Notes for tasks, projects, folders and contexts
☆ Fast and smart search
Have a productive day!
My personal GTD actions and to-do management system
Like for most people, my personal and professional life has become increasingly busy. I've got a busy family life with a lovely wife and two beautiful daughters. My Field CTO role at ITQ is keeping me pretty busy, mostly during office hours. I picked up teaching as a freelance IT docent at the Novi Hogeschool in Utrecht. I want to get back in shape, so I picked up playing basketball, running and going the gym, and I also have some dormant ambitions in terms of study and education. In other words, a busy but very enjoyable life :-). I have recently set up Getting Things Done (GTD) in Outlook and To-Do with Braintoss as my capture tool to help manage my actions and to-dos.
I've been out on summer holiday and that gave me some time to reflect and think of ways to better organize my 'stuff'. I decided to start writing this non-technical blogpost to get some thoughts in writing. I put it away and picked it back up a number of times so there might be some inconsistency here and there. It's also pretty long for a single blogpost, but I decided to keep it this way for readability purposes…
My full schedule requires a routine and way of working to stay on top of things. Idatabase 3 33. Above all, I need a system to keep track of all my actions and to-dos. My brain can no longer keep track of everything, so I need an external system I can rely on. I've been intrigued by time management and self-management systems and methods, and I tried various over time. Using everything I've read and learned along the way, I created an easy to use and fairly simple system for myself in which I basically cherrypicked bits and pieces. Maybe this blogpost helps or inspires others and I might even find ways to improve my own system by trying to explain it in this blogpost.
Getting Things Done (GTD) as the foundation
I really like the fundamental concepts of David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD). I highly recommend his book and there is a ton of information available on the internet. There is a huge GTD community out there. There are excellent guides out there but everyone needs to find a personal way of working and system. I decided to set up Getting Things Done (GTD) in Outlook and To-Do after some experimentation.
Personal vs Work?
With a work/life balance under pressure and our ‘always connected' industry, I decided not to differentiate between work life and personal life in my system. It's not like I can switch between a personal and work brain. Important work stuff pop up in my head in personal time and vice versa.
Of course, I can plan when and where I want to take on personal actions and work actions, but my system is set up as a single system with all my actions and to-do's in one place/system.
Capturing EVERYTHING in a Single Inbox
1/3 Symbol
I like the concept of having a single 'Inbox' (or in-tray in GTD speak) for all the stuff that gets thrown at me throughout the day (or I throw at myself). This can be work-related, personal, things that pop up in my head (often at the most impractical times), emails, phone calls, messages on Slack/Teams, stuff I read, social media, etc. etc. I want an easy way to capture it all.
After experimenting with various tools and apps I have now set up Getting Things Done (GTD) in Outlook and To-Do, with my Outlook Inbox as my 'Inbox'. Most work-related stuff and a lot of personal stuff is coming in via e-mail anyway and there are simple ways to capture random stuff using email. The unified Inbox in Outlook nicely consolidates every account's inbox to a single inbox.
I'm using the app Braintoss to quickly capture stuff that pops up in my head using a quick note or an audio clip (really handy when driving!). I also capture stuff online using Braintoss, and I can quickly snap pictures of physical items. When I scan my Twitter timeline, for example, I often come across something interesting and I don't have the time or energy to digest it at that moment. So, I quickly capture it in Braintoss. Braintoss automatically sends everything to my email Inbox. Our brain works in curious ways and random stuff that needs to be done at some specific time or location pops up in the most inconvenient times and places. Braintoss allows me to capture the chaos.
Dealing with the Inbox with GTD
With an easy system in place to capture everything in my Inbox, we now need to set up a routine to frequently go through all the items in the inbox. At set times or whenever I feel like it, I open my Inbox and go through all the stuff in there. I then decide what to do with it. The GTD system provides a great workflow for doing this:
It looks labour intensive but it's really simple: does the item require me to do anything? In other words, is it actionable? If the answer is no, I basically decide if I want to trash it or file (reference) it. Let's say I bought some tickets for the movies. I don't need them right away and there isn't really something I need to do with them except filing them somewhere I can easily find them when I'm going to the movies. I use Evernote as my digital personal archive. I store all my important personal stuff there. The indexing is great and you can even search text in PDFs. The Scannable app allows me to easily scan snail mail using my iPhone and the macOS integration allows me to easily archive digital stuff into Evernote. All my work-related important stuff is securely stored on ITQ's Office 365.
If the item IS actionable, GTD tells you to do it immediately if it takes less than 2 minutes. The time it takes to plan it is probably longer. Although I like the completeness of the GTD workflow, I typically don't bother explicitly with the other steps. If it's actionable, I create a Task that goes into Microsoft To-Do. This means I capture all my stuff in Outlook but all my actionable items go into To-Do, which is much better equipped to handle tasks than Outlook is. This way of working also ensures my e-mail inbox is almost always empty or near empty, which is a really big plus and stress relief now I set up Getting Things Done (GTD) in Outlook and To-Do.
Setting up Microsoft To-Do for GTD
We now have a system that allows me to quickly capture everything in my Inbox, I can archive important personal stuff in Evernote and important work stuff in Office 365 at ITQ. We can easily create actionable tasks by right-clicking an email message in Outlook and selecting Create –> Task: A story about my uncle 1 1.
Now, do yourself a favor and try to be clear and concise when describing a task. Force yourself to start the task with a verb. That helps. Don't create a task called 'Important John' because you are likely to forget what was important regarding John if you look at it a week later. Instead, say 'Call John about project XYZ to discuss deadline'. Takes you 10 seconds longer but nothing is more frustrating than knowing something important is in your next actions list, but you can't remember what needs to be done.
I set up Getting Things Done (GTD) in Outlook and To-Do as a kind of 'GTD lite' system. I didn't create all the folders that GTD uses. I created the following folders and lists:
Waiting for
If I'm waiting for someone before I can complete my task, I move my action into this list. Awesome mails pro 3 0 2 download free. If I left John a voicemail message for example to call me back, I want to make sure to keep track of it. Here I use hashtags in To-Do to keep track of who I'm waiting for. Hashtags allow you to easily search through all your actions:
Projects
The term project is a bit ambiguous in GTD. It doesn't mean it needs to be a formal project. It simply means something needs 2 actions or more. You don't want to have big fuzzy projects in your system as a single task like 'Finish new website'. You need to break this down into smaller actionable items and decide what the next physical action should be to move this 'project' ahead. So, work projects go onto the work projects list and personal projects on the personal project list.
Next-Action Lists
My setup relies heavily on lists in To-Do. The next-actions folder is probably the most important and holds my most frequently used lists.
[I tried OmniFocus for a while and I liked the use of contexts/tags and how its is fully built around GTD, but there isn't a proper integration with Outlook so I decided to drop it.]
Certain actions can only be completed at a specific time or location. If I need to record a Lightboard video for ITQ for example, I need to physically be at the ITQ office. Most personal stuff can, and of course should, only be done at home. In practice, a lot of my tasks are online/digital and can be done from every place and every time. So, most of my actions go into the Anywhere list. Remember, just because I'm filing an action in a certain list doesn't say anything about when I'm going to work on it. It's just saying I am not constrained to a certain location, time or thing.
The Calls list contains all the people I need to call, obviously. This is a handy list before jumping in the car! Remember to be explicit about who you should call about what topic.
You can get really creative with these next-action lists. I've seen people organize their tasks based on the required level of effort (low, medium and high) and/or energy level. If you have 20 minutes to spare between meetings you probably don't want to take on something complex and challenging. You can simply pick something from the 'low energy' list.
Meetings
A fair deal of my time is consumed by recurring meetings. In my role as Field CTO I need to align with numerous people at ITQ on a regular base. I also have a number of different team meetings. I created lists for all of them so I can easily capture agenda items or topics to discuss. Let's say I have a monthly meeting with John. During the weeks in between meetings, several topics can come up which I need to discuss with John during our 1:1. They all go on the list 'John'. The same goes for team meetings. If I want to address something in the upcoming sales meeting, I capture it on the list 'Sales'.
Checklists
I'm getting a bit lazy by using this system, so I created a number of checklists for recurring things. I have a travel checklist which captures everything I need to pack and prepare when going on business travel (no more forgetting my US/UK travel adapter or my passport). Yes, it even reminds me to pack underwear and socks. Another one is for filing my taxes for example. Every year I was going through all the documents I need to send my accountant and always wondering if I wasn't forgetting anything important. Really handy to create a checklist!
Someday/Maybe
This one is also straight out of GTD. There can be stuff I would like to do but there really isn't a commitment, deadline, or anything related. That goes on this list. Once every while I go through it and delete a bunch of stuff or move it to my next-action lists or projects.
Summary of tools:
- Braintoss to capture stuff
- Outlook as my Inbox
- Microsoft To-Do to handle tasks/actions
- Evernote as my personal digital archive
- Scannable to scan physical documents into Evernote
- Office 365 as my work digital archive
Areas of improvement
1.3 As A Fraction
Prioritizing
Chaos Control 1 3 – Gtd & Tasks Free Printable
As you might have noticed, this blogpost describes how I capture all my tasks and handle them. I don't share anything about prioritizing. This is something I need to get a better grip on. Based on some excellent feedback and coaching from my manager and ITQ CEO, Robert Hellings, I am going to identify weekly and monthly goals for myself. By articulating what's important to ME and my own responsibilities, I can better prioritize. This will prevent a system overload in which I'm constantly chasing other people's priorities. This definitely needs soms attention!
Weekly routine
As I mentioned in my intro, my weeks are pretty full. I have different responsibilities at work and in my personal life. I started to create a weekly routine/schedule in which I want to take on and plan different types of 'tasks'. This means planning time for running, going to the gym, and playing basketball outside of office hours, but also when I'm doing different types of tasks at ITQ. It will not always be possible to stick to my routine but at least I have some solid guidelines.
External task management systems
One thing I need to work on, is how I'm going to deal with external task management systems. At ITQ we often work with MS Planner for example. Tasks assigned to me drop into To-Do, but I can't pull them into my system of next-action lists. I also work for customers and they often also have a system set up, like Jira or Trello for example. I definitely don't want to duplicate everything and keep track of stuff in multiple places but I also don't want to have to deal with multiple systems. I need to think this over a bit…
Conclusion
1/3 As A Decimal
That's is for now. This is how I set up Getting Things Done (GTD) in Outlook and To-Do using Braintoss as my main capture tool. I'm really excited to start working on my routine and improving my system. When things get hectic it's tempting to cut some corners but I'm really going to try to stick with my system. In the long rong, I'm convinced it will save me a lot of time and stress.
1/3 As A Percent
External task management systems
One thing I need to work on, is how I'm going to deal with external task management systems. At ITQ we often work with MS Planner for example. Tasks assigned to me drop into To-Do, but I can't pull them into my system of next-action lists. I also work for customers and they often also have a system set up, like Jira or Trello for example. I definitely don't want to duplicate everything and keep track of stuff in multiple places but I also don't want to have to deal with multiple systems. I need to think this over a bit…
Conclusion
1/3 As A Decimal
That's is for now. This is how I set up Getting Things Done (GTD) in Outlook and To-Do using Braintoss as my main capture tool. I'm really excited to start working on my routine and improving my system. When things get hectic it's tempting to cut some corners but I'm really going to try to stick with my system. In the long rong, I'm convinced it will save me a lot of time and stress.
1/3 As A Percent
If you have a similar system set up or have thoughts about improving mine, please reach out to me on Twitter.
