Russell Quinn's "A guide to personal productivity" details how he uses Backpack to stay organized.
Backpack - This is the cornerstone of everything. A super simple, web-based organisation tool that is so flexible it can accommodate almost any work flow you can think of. Although it has recently grown into a group-based, ‘intranet’ system, it still scales-down to support the lone user.
My tasks are essentially organised into a series of to-do lists that are in turn grouped into a number of pages. My page setup looks like this:
- 0. Dropbox - This is my task inbox. Anything that I have on my mind initially ends up in here, whether it’s a quick admin chore, an idea for a new project, or a life goal - the dropbox gets everything out of my head and stored safely into my system. Backpack even supports emailing text and files directly into this page. It also contains my today/urgent list (more on that later).
- 1. Tasks - General to-dos and things that have a definite goal are grouped together here: ‘buy X a birthday present’, ‘pay electricity bill’ and ‘pump up bicycle tyres’ are all examples of short, succinct tasks. Within this page I have five lists titled General, People, Administration, Finances and Technology, which is what I can categorise most of my tasks into. I often make location-based task lists too. These are groups of tasks that I need to do the next time I’m at at a certain place, like the post office or train station.
- 2. Projects - As I’ve already mentioned, all of my company/team-related projects are in another system entirely. This page is for my solo, non-client projects. The definition of a project, as opposed to a task, is something that has a long term, abstract goal with an ongoing series of tasks to reach it. Examples of projects are Writing, Creative, Learning German and Chess Club. Each project has its own list on the page and always contains the next atomic tasks I need to complete in order to move that project forward.
- 3. Waiting For - A record of everything that I’m waiting for other people to complete. This page is grouped up into Orders (goods that I’ve purchased online and am waiting to arrive in the mail), Administration (usually questions about some legal or taxation issue) and Financial (people who owe me money :)
- 4. To Buy - A simple list of things that I need to buy, grouped by the general locations where I can get them from.
- 5. Someday - This is the daydreaming list. ‘Write a film’, ‘fly to the stars’ and ’save the whale’ are all things I (maybe) want to do at some point in my life, but there’s no way of breaking them down into concrete, atomic tasks at the moment, so they end up here where they’re safe and organised.
- @PAGES - I have a lot of information pages where I just group together thoughts and supporting documents about things I’m working on. I prefix all of these with @’s.
- §PAGES - Finally, I lied slightly about this being a totally personal system. My girlfriend Lucy and I share some pages and these are prefixed with §’s. The examples above are to store films we’d both like to see and who last did the grocery shopping.
The final type of task is the recurring task. These are the things that come around on a regular basis, like visiting the dentist, paying taxes or watering the plants. Backpack supports these too with its ‘reminders’ feature. Simply add the task to receive an email (and optionally an SMS) at the defined interval. Reminders are also great for single items that have a specific deadline - this really helps to keep tasks out of your calendar.
Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.
