Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Using GTD and kanban for a custom workflow

We are always interested in hearing about people’s setups for staying organized—there’s always quite a variety! This week’s tip from ioparaskev is an interesting workflow: it uses GTD and kanban principles to keep many things organized while also keeping a realistic perspective from week to week. :)

After using to-do apps for about 2 years I strongly believe I’ve found a flow that suits me:

I use lists like kanban/GTD lists. I have Done, Active, Next, Queue, Blocked, Frozen.

Everything starts from Queue, and every week I plan my week’s tasks. This week’s tasks go in the Next Pick list. When I start working on them they move to Active. If for some reason they are blocked or dumped, they go to Blocked or Frozen. When they’re done, they go to Done and are marked as done.

I use tags to denote the projects and any other info a task is related to. For example I have tags like work, study, bug, documentation, project-A, project-B, leisure, github, etc.

I make “heavy” use of the Smart Lists. For example, I have one “Work Today” where I have the work tasks that I’m currently working on, or the tasks that should start today, or the tasks that should have started before today, or the tasks that are due today or before today.

The query is the following:

(list:Active OR (list:Next Pick start:today OR startBefore:today OR due:today OR dueBefore:today)) AND tag:work

I have similar (but simpler) Smart Lists to filter out Next Pick Work, Work Queue, Next Pick Study, etc.

Since I use due dates and start dates, the Today view is also helpful to see what am I supposed to do today in general. In today I have a custom sorting where I group by list and sort by priority. That way I have a crystal clear view how behind schedule am I in general . If for example I have 10 tasks in Active and 20 in Next Pick and its Thursday, this means that I’m way behind schedule and I probably need to reschedule and/or reprioritize.

Thanks for sharing this tip, ioparaskev! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.

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