Entrepreneurs juggle many hats and projects. On top, tasks from your private life pile up. How can you stay on top of your tasks?

Entrepreneurs juggle many hats. Customers, sales, investors, finance, employees — everybody craves for your attention.

Yet there is a limit that applies to entrepreneurs just like everybody else: The day is limited to 24 hours. And you can’t work around the clock constantly, or you will burn out.

So what can you do? Here are some step-by-step recommendations from my daily grind as the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company.

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 Founder & CEO of a 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:

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.

You need to overcome the fantasy of an empty My Tasks view in Asana. If you’re involved in several different things simultaneously, 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 a recurring task, 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 report, maintaining your water decalcification system, reordering blades for your lawn mowing robot, vaccinating your cat, or renewing your passport.
• Every Friday, I create new tasks for every meeting in the next 4 weeks, and for all the things I would like to move forward in the next 4 weeks. If lots of recurring tasks pop up for the following week or if I am traveling, I am less ambitious with creating tasks to move things forward. If my task list is short, I discipline myself to add more items to push things forward.
• Whenever I accept a meeting invite during the week, I immediately create a new task for that meeting.

3. The 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 Friday, I add all tasks I would like to get done in the following 4 weeks to the project called “Sprint”.

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

• Backlog: All the tasks in my sprint for which I need to prepare.
• Ready: All the tasks in my 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.
• 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 for not having 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 who 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:

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.

4. The “Block” and the “Admin” category

So far, we’ve been talking about gaining and keeping the overview of many different tasks.

But how do you actually get rid of all those tasks?

The easy way is to do stuff half-heartedly, or hope people will forget they gave you a task. Not a very good strategy for entrepreneurs.

The hard way is to try to finish everything due today before you go to bed tonight. That’s going to be hard on hectic days, and you will underutilize quiet days. Yet another ill-suited strategy for entrepreneurial life.

The smart way is to balance planned and unplanned work. There is always something unplanned that gets in the way of your beautifully planned day — an urgent bug, a medical emergency with one of your employees or kids, you name it.

But you still need to get your planned tasks done, no matter how hectic your day turns out.

Here is how I manage planned tasks:

• I created an Admin project in Asana, adding all admin tasks to this project. Most admin is planned — it comes once a week, once a month, or once a year — yet most people are still surprised by month-end tasks month after month. But nobody said you cannot complete your monthly admin tasks on the 23rd of the month, or your weekly admin tasks on Thursdays.
• I created a Block project in Asana, adding all tasks that require blocking some time. Think of product work, building a new finance dashboard, strategizing, etc.

Now comes the key thing: Because Asana allows tasks to be added to multiple projects, my upcoming tasks show all the Admin and Block tasks in black color:

It’s my personal race against myself to get those Admin and Block tasks done before their due date. 

Whenever I have an idle slot because I am waiting for a phone call to be returned or somebody to join a scheduled video call, I work on Admin tasks. Same thing when I’m working on a train, or when I feel sleepy (typically early morning or after lunch), I work on Admin tasks. Other entrepreneurs waste their time scrolling through LinkedIn.

Using the non-productive time periods for Admin tasks frees up tons of time. What’s more, it frees up time during the most productive periods of the day. And that’s when I work on Block tasks — unless an urgency pops up and I have the capacity to react on it.

Sometimes people ask me how I manage to juggle all my different activities. The Admin and Block system is the whole magic behind it.

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.

But the most important aspect is discipline. If you don’t add new tasks consistently and if you’re easy on yourself with those Admin and Block tasks, your headstart will vaporize faster than you think.