Add tasks in the middle of your work

If you follow this blog very much, you know that I play with a lot of productivity tools. A trend I’m starting to see emerge is the idea of having tasks mixed in with your notes, and I really like it.

It can be a tricky thing to pull off. With any task system, you don’t want those tasks to get lost and forgotten. In many cases, if you save some tasks that are mixed in with your notes, they’re likely to be forgotten and orphaned over time.

I’ve seen two good examples of this recently, and there are likely others. The first place I saw it was in Asana, the task management system that we used at GreenMellen for a while in 2014/2015. While we eventually moved away from it for other reasons, the ability to add a task in the middle of a conversation was brilliant, and something I miss now.

The second is with Roam Research.

Roam Research

My current personal task system is in Roam Research. Roam’s task system isn’t great, in general, but the ability to add tasks on the fly is absolutely amazing. Below is a simple example from a few weeks ago; I’ve still been working on my interstitial journaling during the day, and then can just mix tasks in whenever I want:

As I mentioned above, Roam is an imperfect system for tasks, and would be unmanageable for our full team right now. For me, though, it’s a perfect way to deal with personal tasks throughout the day, and I hope other products begin to integrate similar systems in the future.

If you’re interested in using Roam for tasks, here’s a bit more about how I do it:

Originally published at https://www.mickmel.com on February 25, 2021.