Tracking Progress and Prioritizing Work

A new year often leads to new resolutions to be better prepared or at least keep a handle on where you are in reaching a goal or accomplishing a task.

Before last year, I typically used a old fashioned paper diary and:

• on a daily basis wrote down what I was accomplishing.
• at the start of the next day I’d draw up a TODO list to prioritize the work load for the day ahead.

Doing this sort of tracking helped in to ways. The daily recording of accomplishments helps you realise you daily wins and mentally recognise the progress you are making. The importance of this was validated for me earlier this year when I read this awesome article and accompanying video on LifeHacker

One of the great things that the video lead me to was the productivity tool idonethis. The benefits of utilizing a service like this over a paper diary are manifold:

• A daily e-mail reminder prompting you to fill in your progress. This e-mail is sent at a configurable time every day (you can also specify which days it is sent on) and contains useful tips or summaries of recent or previous “wins”.
• The diary can be filled in simply by replying to that e-mail or else you can log your activity via the web app itself.
• Searchable word-cloud allowing you to drill into your accomplishments to tie them together.

Tied with tracking progress, another great tool I’ve used this year is Trello. Trello let’s you create lists. Everything from simple to do lists to…well everything, I’ve played around with Android only todo apps, WunderList and many other such tools, but for me Trello stands out head and shoulders above the others for several reasons:

• Totally free
• Totally shareable with other users (most alternatives only have this social through premium/paid accounts)
• Excellant Android support.

The flexibility of the services allows you to easily create and maintain prioritized work lists across different aspects of your professional and social life. It also ties in with the philosophy of recognising your accomplishments by moving a task from To Do, to Doing and ultimately to Done (other list titles are available :).

These two tools tie in with modern work practices like Daily Scrum where idonethis let’s you identify the “What did you do?”, trello focuses you on the “What will you do today?” and both help with ”What issues do you have?”