What works for software development, also works for personal task management

At Yonder, the B2B SaaS company I co-founded, our development team uses agile methods for development work, like thousands of other companies.

But have you ever thought about using agile methods to organize your tasks?

Being involved in many different things, I borrowed the sprint method from our development team to organize my ever-changing stream of stuff waiting to get done.

I use the free version of Asana for my work organization, although you can use pretty much any Kanban-style task management tool. Try to stick to one tool you like rather than re-tooling all the time.

Here are the steps I took to create my personal sprint board:

1. Create Asana projects for each of your activities

I set up an Asana project for every activity, project, engagement, and commitment I am involved with.

As a native German speaker and the Co-Founder & CEO of a B2B SaaS company serving customers internationally, some of my projects have German names, while some others have English names. Don’t bother. It’s not worth thinking too long about languages, as you can always rename a project later.

Color-coding the projects helps to keep the overview of your upcoming tasks in the next 7 days, as every task contains one or several project labels:

My Asana projects
Sample view of my color-coded Asana projects, with real project names and hidden task names (source: author)

2. Log every single task and assign it to a project

Now comes the hard part. Every task management tool is only as good as the discipline of setting up new tasks for everything that needs to get done.

Psychologically, you need to overcome the joy of having an empty My Tasks view in Asana. If you’re involved in several different things at the same time, there is always something that needs to get done.

I use three strategies to log my tasks:

  • Asana’s recurrent task feature helps you set up tedious tasks once and forever. Whenever you complete recurrent tasks, it automatically generates a new one that will pop up in your upcoming tasks 7 days before it’s due. So you will never again forget sending out that investor’s reporting, maintaining your water decalcification system, reordering blades for your lawn mowing robot, vaccinating your cat, or renewing your passport.
  • Every week on Fridays, I create new tasks for every meeting of the following week, and for all the things I would like to move forward in the next week. If lots of recurrent tasks pop up for the following week or if I am traveling, I am being a little less ambitious with creating tasks to move things forward. If my task list is short, I push myself to add more stuff to drive things forward.
  • Whenever I accept a meeting invite during the week, I immediately create a new task for that meeting.

3. Tidy up with a personal sprint board

In Asana, you can assign each task to multiple projects. And for each project, you can define the default view as “list” or “board”, amongst others.

So I created a project called “Sprint” in board view. And every week on Fridays, I add all tasks I would like to get done the following week to the project called “Sprint”.

In my personal sprint board, I have created the following column labels:

  • Backlog: All the tasks in my weekly sprint that I haven’t done anything with yet, and for which I do not need to prepare anything.
  • Ready: All the tasks in my weekly sprint that aren’t done yet, but I did all the required preparation work. I typically use this swim lane for meetings after I prepared them.
  • Clear: Every evening, I shift all the tasks that need to be done the following day into the “clear” column. In this way, I have an accurate feeling if I’m going to have time to work on non-critical tasks the following day, or if I need to run a tight and efficient schedule.
  • In Progress: Some tasks cannot be done in one go, especially the larger, non-critical tasks. Just like in development work, once I started working on such a task, it goes into the “in progress” column. I am paying great attention not to have too many “in progress” tasks in order not to lose focus.
  • Waiting: Many things that I work on depend on other people. Whenever I cannot continue before somebody else has done their part or replied, the tasks go into the “waiting” column. Every evening, I check the “waiting” column to see whom I need to chase the next day to finish these tasks on time. Those who have worked with me know that I can be an absolute pain in chasing people — now you know the methodology behind it.

And this is an example of what my personal sprint board looks like:

My Asana kanban board
Sample view of my personal sprint board, with hidden task names (source: author)

I love the simple overview of all my activities, no matter if they are business-related or private. The color coding, the due dates, and the number of items in each column help me stay efficient and focused.

Conclusion

Please don’t understand this article as an Asana tutorial. You can use any Kanban-style task management tool you like or already use, and you can adapt the system to fit your personal situation and work style.

My personal sprint board wasn’t built in a day — I worked on it over several years. Every time I feel it needs changing, I change it immediately — adopting the agile philosophy also in developing my work style.