Keeping Track of All of Your Tasks?

An anonymous reader asks: "I work for a Fortune 500 Company as a Unix sysadmin and at any given time I may be working with 10 different project teams, each with their own milestones, tasks/to-dos, notes and reportable status. I'm constantly losing track of tasks that I need to do, notes I've taken and status reports that I've written. I've tried paper solutions, PDAs, Microsoft Project and groupware type stuff and nothing really seems designed to allow me to track mulitple project with mulitple tasks and to-dos as well as keep up with the status and notes that I generate from each of these tasks. How do you keep it all straight?"

Comments

Sharp Zaurus & K/OPI

[crstophr]

Hey there. I'm also a UNIX Admin for a Fortune 500 company. Recently I was promoted to "lead" and I just got slammed with tasks to track.

I went out and bought a Sharp Zaurus SL-C3100. Google it. They're a great PDA, clamshell design with a real keyboard you can actually use. You can get one cheaper if you look at the SL-C3000 or SL-C1000 models.

I'm using the K/OPI package todo function to do all my task tracking. It includes start dates, percent completed, etc. I blieve you can sync it with KDE and if you want to fuss with it even Outlook.

Every week I look at my list of completed tasks and copy that information down as my weekly status report.

Putting the PDA on WIFI gives me ssh access and I can actually get into boxes and look at things to answer question during meetings.

It's a great solution for a UNIX admin.

--Chris

GTD TiddlyWiki

[TeXMaster]

I don't know if it's fit for "pro" use, but you might consider the Getting Things Done TiddlyWiki. It's an extension/spinoff of Jeremy Ruston's TiddlyWiki, with enhancement specifics to getting things done.

A single GTD might be enough to manage all the projects, using Tiddlers for notes and such. It's a single file that can be carried around on a stick, and needs a browser to be edited, so it might be simpler to set up than a more complex server-side tool like Trac (which you might look into, although I don't know how good it is for non-software projects).

Biggest drawback of GTD TiddlyWiki seems to be the lack of timelines. These might be implementable via macros if/when GTD will use the most recent version of Jeremy's TiddlyWiki.

XPlanner

[Dr. Bent]

http://www.xplanner.org/

You don't have to be eXtreme to use it. We're not.

Re:E-mail

[PerlDudeXL]

I just found this interesting approach:

Living in text files:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7567