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WorkFlowy as a Personal Task Management Tool

Since I was introduced to WorkFlowy by my fellow tech entrepreneur, Joel Gascoigne of OnePage, I have been using it daily as my personal task management tool. WorkFlowy is a simple outline tool that can be used in multiple ways, e.g. build your business plan.

I have tried many task management tools since venturing into the exciting world of tech entrepreneurship in 2004, but never found anything that is as simple as workflowy. For many years, I used MindManager from MindJet, a licensed software application for mind mapping to plan my daily, weekly, monthly and annual schedules.

For daily and weekly tasks management, I would continue to use WorkFlowy. Monthly and Annual plans, I will continue to use Mind Mapping, which is licensed software and not SaaS.

Having trialled, how do I plan to use WorkFlowy:

  1. Every night, I plan to add the tasks for the next day and review the tasks for the week
  2. Those daily tasks which were scheduled but not completed on the day will be distributed across the next few days
  3. Tasks completed will be crossed out and will remain intact as a diary entry.

I am also thinking of adding a summary of the day’s accomplishments, as a Journal entry, which should help me produce Progress Reports at key periods.

In terms of general planning, I break a company into ten areas. This is something I have been practicing for many years. You may also benefit from this process. Here are the 10 areas:

  1. Opportunity – Opportunity analysis and refinement, business planning, strategy, competitor analysis, etc
  2. Product – Product development, road maps, testing, etc
  3. Marketing – Market plans, segmentation, etc
  4. Sales – Sales plans, target list, sales performance, etc
  5. Operations – Operational plans, scheduling, progress reporting, etc
  6. Service – Customer service, support desks,
  7. Finance – Financial forecasting, annual accounts, Tax, etc
  8. HR – Worforce management, recruitment, etc
  9. Legal – Contracts, legal compliances, companies house, etc
  10. Other – anything that does not fit into above

The starting point for above was Michael Porter’s Value Chain Analysis. But as you can see, above is quite different from Michael’s well founded framework. What matters is, above works for me, and it may also bring you discipline.

One last point to clarify; above breakdown is more suited to monthly and annual planning (in my case; on mindmaps). From there, you could breakdown to daily and weekly targets and add them to your WorkFlowy.

I am keen to understand how you segment your work.

Published inedocr.com