How do time management gurus hack a better GTD experience using Task.it?

TL;DR: David Allen's "Getting Things Done" (GTD) is great - but it’s a lot of work to schedule and reschedule the tasks from your universal “in tray.” Task.it handles that rescheduling.

Apart from the tasks themselves, what part of the GTD method takes the most amount of work? For many, it is scheduling tasks from your “in tray” and prioritizing them. Task.it saves time by using your calendar as your “to do” list (i.e. your universal “in-tray” in GTD parlance.) Task.it auto-reschedules your tasks every hour. Also, Task.it saves time by dividing up prioritization into multiple moments in the day when you are looking at your calendar. Triaging tasks becomes a more natural part of your day.

BACKGROUND

One premise of GTD is to have a universal "in-tray" to capture all of your tasks.

With Task.it, your universal in-tray is your calendar. Blocking time on your calendar represents the commitment in time you are putting towards a task.

Here are four steps to making GTD effortless with Task.it.

STEP ONE

("CONNECT & COLLECT'): To begin, connect one or more calendars by visiting the website Task.it. Choose one calendar to be the "in-tray" calendar into which you will collect all tasks. You will also want to connect any additional calendars which may have your availability so Task.it knows when to schedule and not schedule tasks.

1 - Enter tasks into the Task.It website using the "Use New Task" tab

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2 - Put the keyword "task.it" into the notes/description section of any calendar item you want to be a task that is rescheduled if uncompleted.

STEP TWO

("CLARIFY'): In traditional GTD, we "CONDENSE" the task into the "next action" to be taken, "DELEGATE" what tasks we can, and "PRIORITIZE" others.

With Task.it, here's how you accomplish each part of step two:

1 - CONDENSE: Condense the task by simply titling the task with the next action to be taken or by writing the next action to be taken into the description/notes section of the task.

2 - DELEGATE: Delegate tasks by entering the email of the people to whom you are delegating the task by entering it into the "delegate" section of the website. If you used the "task.it" keyword approach, simply invite the person to your task like you invite people to meetings.

3 - PRIORITIZE: You can prioritize the order in which you want to have tasks scheduled by adding a rank value for "urgency" and "importance." Lower numbers are the highest priority.

The next steps are where Task.It really begins to make a difference, save time, and shine.

STEP THREE

("ORGANIZE"): In traditional GTD, you organize the list of tasks by setting reminders and defining the context in which to do the task.

1 - REMINDERS - One premise of GTD is that we should never have a thought more than once unless we like having that thought. The universal in-tray aims to help relieve our mind from reminders when we can’t do anything about them.

Yet, consider the problem of traditional reminder interruptions: we often get reminders at times we are unable to take action. These systems give us the burden of carrying the task in our minds more often than necessary. This is information overhead in the absence of action.

Information in the absence of action is overhead.

With Task.it, you can stop setting reminders. Task.it will schedule tasks into empty slots in your calendar. When you look at your calendar, the reminder is seeing the task scheduled on the calendar.

With Task.it you can stop setting reminders. The reminder is the scheduled task on the calendar.

DEADLINES: Tasks with deadlines can be particularly important to track. Task.it has a special way to handle the needs of tasks with due dates. Task.it enables you to intelligently delay action on a task particularly when it has a deadline. If you want to track a deadline to ensure you know when you can delay action on the task, simply add a date to the "deadline" section on the "Add Tasks" tab of Task.it or add the keyword "DEADLINE" or "DUE" with a date (e.g. "DUE December 20, 2020".) Task.it will rename the title of the task daily so you know how many days are left (e.g. "4d: Read the paper" indicates there are four days left to the deadline.)

2 - CONTEXT - Task.it helps with defining context as well. With Task.it, you can use the "ON" command to choose within what blocks of time Task.it will schedule that particular task. Using the website, you can choose "weekends", "weeknights" or "weekdays" (default). You can also choose what day of the week or within what range of time you want the item scheduled. If you are entering a Task.it item directly into your calendar: simply write, "ON weekends" or "ON Mondays" to direct Task.it. You can also use the "between" command to specify blocks of time, such as "BETWEEN 9am-12pm." Read more about Task.it commands here for other types of context you can set.

STEP FOUR

("REFLECT", "ENGAGE" AND "RESCHEDULE"):

Task.it combines the 4th and 5th step of GTD into one.

GTD aims to relieve and close the open-loops of unresolved plans by having a place you wrote something down in a collection tool you trust and know you will review appropriately sometime soon.

1 - REFLECT/ENGAGE: In traditional GTD, you schedule regular time to review your list of tasks to decide with which you will engage. For Task.it, this step is woven into your daily workflow: you can reflect and triage your work each time you look at your calendar and see tasks. By default, the tasks you triage first become those to which you have committed to engage. Engagement is simply using the time to address the task in front of you. Lower priority tasks simply directs Task.it to schedule the task into an anticipated future.

Importantly, with Task.it, this review is continuous and performed in smaller batches of time. When you look at your calendar, you can see at a glance the entire breadth of your scheduled tasks and to what extent you may be over-scheduled. You can more easily make decisions about when to accept additional meetings, work, or projects because all of your tasks are scheduled and laid out before you.

With Task.it, you can more easily make decisions about when to accept additional work because all your tasks are scheduled and shown.

2 - RESCHEDULE: Life doesn't always go as planned. The best part of Task.it is that tasks will automatically reschedule if you don't complete them. Task.it takes you off the treadmill of GTD rescheduling.

CONCLUSIONS

Task.it takes you off the treadmill of GTD rescheduling.

Task.it combined with the GTD enables the most effortless way to track tasks we have yet created.