Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I'm in a similar situation, but perhaps the key difference is that my company requires me to maintain paper records of everything that I do. If I change the contents of a script, I have to print and file paperwork stating that I checked out the script from my configuration management tool, estimated how long it would make the change and what impact it will have, got management approval, made the change, tested the code, recorded actuals, and checked everything back in. Anal, yes, but...
Everyone in my company is aware that I need to do this paperwork and it gets factored into the time I can spend on doing a task. In other words, if the PHB pops into my cubicle and asks me to change the font on a web page, he knows it's going to take at least an hour.
I suspect your problem isn't so much that you can't find one solution, it's that you can't find enough time to fully utilize any of the solutions you do have. Even a plain old notebook works wonders if you have only one task to do each day and can devote several hours to managing your records for that task, each day.
My suggestion is... and I admit it's paradoxial; jot down on a piece of paper the "title" of each and every meeting minute, form, document, record, spreadsheet, calendar entry, whathaveyou that you create or access during the day, for a week.
Then go to your boss and say "I have to create, modify or review this many artifacts in a typical week, and it takes X hours of my time (where X is a rough number). Either reduce my workload so that I can complete all of the necessary paperwork, or consider dropping some of these artifacts."
The important thing is that you're describing the cost of doing business. It's up to your management to decide if the value of the paperwork you produce outweighs the cost. I would imagine there's considerable value in a change log, especially if you apply patches every day, but in contrast, a status report that no one reads is a waste of company resources.