Best Practices - Working With Firetask
Firetask is designed to be a very dynamic task management tool that does not force you to work in a certain way (although of course heavily inspired by David Allen's Getting Things done approach to task management as outlined in the next chapter). However, we wanted to take the opportunity and summarize a few tips and best practices around how we use Firetask internally:
- Put new tasks and ideas into the Inbox if you do not yet know what do with them -- use the global hotkey and the quick-entry function for this on macOS.
- On the Mac use inline editing and drag & drop to efficiently maintain your task lists; also use keyboard shortcuts to create new tasks (⌘N), add notes (⇧⌘ENTER) and to-dos (⌘T). Use command tagging for making a new task due today (#today), marking the task as In Focus (#!), or quickly assigning it to someone else (@; automatically adding it to your Waiting list).
- Mark tasks as focused Today if you want or need to do them ASAP, do not set their due date to today: this way they stay on top of your task list if they slip to tomorrow and you do not need to move them forward every single day :-).
- If you still have many due or scheduled tasks and you need to adjust multiple dates use the Calendar perspective to do this more efficiently via drag & drop.
- Put all day-to-day stuff that does not qualify into the General task list.
- Create projects for areas of work; use portfolios to group them logically. Arrange the tasks in each project really in the way you want or need to complete them.
- Set the whole project to Not Started if you cannot or do not want to work on it yet, or to On Hold if you need to wait for something in order to continue; this will make sure that tasks of this project will not show up on the Today view, thus keeping you focused on the projects that are currently relevant.
- Create categories for providing context or for easily identifying types of tasks (e.g., we heavily use categories such as Email, Phone, Home, Office, Computer and have indicator icons with different colors configured). Use the same indicator color to visually "group" categories.
Also check out all the preferences Firetask provides -- they can really help you to adjust Firetask to the way you work. Note that you have to adjust preferences individually on each device -- we intentionally do not sync them, as we know from our own experience that you sometimes want different user interface settings for your iPhone and your iPad.
Next: Implementing GTD