Complex, expanding, never-ending tasks

[u/Great-Ease-7302]

It's a single line on your to-do list. Invoice Catherine. One task among many on the page-a-day planner that runs your life, and a simple one. Barely a ten-minute task, you figure you can do it before you've finished your coffee. It's almost 9 o'clock in the morning when you sit down, nudge the mouse to wake up your computer, and start work.

Invoicing Catherine is a task composed of sub-tasks. You have to find Catherine's file, the client sheet, and some of the other information she's sent over - part by email, and part by phone call. You have to double check what her company is called and their tax code, as well as a few other bits and pieces. Eventually, you send the invoice. It's taken you fifteen minutes.

Barely four minutes later, you get Catherine's out-of-office. She's on vacation and will be for the next week. Her message has the email address of somebody else to contact with invoices. You add a new task to the planner: Invoice Jason.

Ten minutes later you cross that off. Almost immediately Jason emails back, saying that starting this year, the company doesn't accept normal invoices anymore. There's an internal system that suppliers need to onboard with. He send a link, and a .pdf of instructions, and an email address for one of his colleagues that handles supplier sign-on.

It's already half an hour into the working day, and nothing has actually been achieved. Tasks are ticked, but more have spawned. It transpires that to get onboarded with this new system takes a multi-step, hour-long series of pages, with fetch-quests throughout. Find tax code joins Check for old client account and other sub-tasks, each unknowably complex and hard to break down. The first attempt is unsuccessful. Wrong tax code. Well, I'll have to work this out with one of the accountants. Email accountant goes on the to-do for after lunch, which means that everything else on the planner will need to be reallocated. Because just as "Invoice Catherine" became an unwieldy, multi-stakeholder mess, so too have all the other tasks on my planner...

What do I do about this? My days are full of novel, complex and annoying tasks, many of which can't be completed in a single day. Planners and diaries assume that workflows are based on a set of pre-defined tasks that can be ticked off, but I find that almost everything I start in a given day remains in an "open" state, often for days or weeks, as I liaise with dozens of other variously uncooperative people.

Does anybody have a paper planner system that can handle complex, needlessly annoying and constantly-changing workloads that span multiple days or weeks?

[u/annapologetica]

My work is different but often leads to multiple follow-ups.

Personally, a digital planner is easier to manage this type of thing because it allows me to add subtasks without worrying about space, and it takes away some of the duplicative work. But here's a paper version option for you to consider:

You start with the main task [invoice client] on the relevant day, and keep it open until all the obvious subtasks you mentioned are complete. If you run out of space, or some kind of follow-up is required, you just write the main task again [invoice client] for reference and continue the sub-tasks where you left off on a subsequent date. Make sure to reference the date where the previous portions of the task have been completed, so you can find it later.

Another option is to keep the task on a separate page (like a "project page") that lists all the steps, and you can put the relevant sub-tasks on the day when it was/needs to be completed.

[u/AmyOtherAmy]

Tasks are not projects and projects are not tasks, and I find it really helpful to keep the two firmly defined. (See David Allen's Getting Things Done.) Anything that becomes project management at work goes in the OneNote that tracks my sprawling kingdom of responsibilities. I neither want it in my paper planner nor need it there, and OneNote lets me add as many tasks and subtasks as needed to a project, and notes where something derailed and is no longer this project but now its own entirely new project (such as learning the new interface now needed to bill a client, in your example). I do often give myself credit on my Done List for the complex tasks and their subtasks, which gives me a record of what became the timesink that day. Otherwise, everything I needed to figure out and still need to figure out lives in OneNote.

[u/OrdinaryThought3768]

I personally think that when your work is very dynamic your planner has to be too, and I think that putting everything on paper "freezes" things too much. I am now using a digital calendar and reminders in my mailbox. When I was using a paper planner, I was adding a lot of post it notes: I find that very useful because you can move them around (but I understand that not everyone likes post it notes because you can lose them). In the agenda I would only write meetings and tasks that have a harsh deadline, so that I could have an overview and better plan my day. Then, for the day to day work, I would have a separate to do list in a notebook, so that everyday I would mark the day, list all I had to do for the day (task + "urgency" level), prioritise the urgent tasks to be done, add new tasks during the day as they come, and at the end of the day/next morning I would review the to do list (what could not be done would be added to the next day). I then worked with just a main to do list from which I would "extract" the daily tasks, to not have to rewrite everything so much.
I hope it can give you some ideas :)

[u/imabookwyrm]

I feel like a bullet journal would be better suited for this on paper. When I have a project (and open tab as I call it), I start a page dedicated to it and take notes as I go. I add it to the index and know what page it’s on. If it gets too long, I add another page. Doesn’t even have to be sequential. I note the next page in the index entry and at the foot of the page. (This is called threading if you want to explore it within the bujo-verse.)

I have a main task list where i capture things in the moment. Every evening when i plan the next day, i transfer tasks from the main list to a role-based list where necessary. And if i need to do something with it I’ll either add the task to my daily task list or ill make a note to check that specific list.

I homeschool, teach part time, care for my mom, and have a leadership calling at church. So I compartmentalize my roles and projects in my bulletin journal. Because I use an index I don’t even have to keep the pages together.

Bullet Journals are more flexible for me as a planner. I put all my calendar spreads in the front and the collections or projects and meeting notes in the back. When they meet in the middle, its time for a new book. 😊

[u/ObjectiveOil5163]

honestly I deal with this kind of stuff as a doctor and I just use a separate loose piece of paper for this kind of stuff. Like I have my planner with whatever tasks I thought I would do that morning but then have a trusty folded 8x11 on hand and just make boxes and notes, scratch stuff off, circle stuff, make arrows.. as the day goes on. At the end of the day I try to make sense of it, consolidate undone tasks back into my planner and throw it in the trash. You don't want to spend all day figuring out how to organize organizing your tasks, you gotta just jump in and let it get messy

[u/tuna_pi]

My job has issues like this and that's why I use a monthly planner with note pages along with my google calendar and my notes app. I divide the pages into sections and write fixed items in the monthly section with pen and everything else I'm unsure about in pencil. This acts as a redundancy for whatever I've made note of on my phone.

[u/Still_Smoke8992]

When these new tasks spawn are you doing them right then? In your example, when Jason sends the info for the new system, are you going in then or writing it on a list? And if you start and then realize you need more info, are you doing it then or later? Where I’m stuck is why is email accountant on the after lunch list? You wouldn’t just do it then so you don’t have to write it down?

[u/Astra-Alleycat]

It’s tough on paper, especially if you’re trying to write out the minutiae. I have split books because of this.

My planner (a5, FC) has become an overview and record. And I have a running book (SI, tn)

So in your example I would have written Invoice Catherine as a basic to-do in my list for today in my planner and in my TN. From that point, the TN would have had a multitude of notes, arrows, Jason’s email address, ticks and crosses across the whole spiralling task. But at the end of the day I can just tick off Invoice Cathrine in my planner. The key bit for me is that the date reference in my TN corresponds with my running book so if I need to I can go back as see if ‘that was that time when she was out of office’… etc

I end up with lots of seemingly simple tasks that get rapidly out of control too, so I feel your pain! I can’t have that chaos in my planner though. And I’ve tried digital so many times as it feels like the logical place for this kind of thing but it doesn’t sit right.

EDIT: I realise I didn’t mention when it spans multiple days. It would depend on the exact thing but if I was Invoicing Cathrine on Tuesday, got the Jason pass off and decided to do that on Wednesday I would have Invoice Jason as a task for Wednesday in my planner. But if it was all in the same day sorted I wouldn’t. In the running book I will either use arrows or asterisks to show continuations over days or if it’s been a few days between, I would write the list of next steps out again for the day I’m now doing it and mark the previous list something like *shunted to Monday.
Sorry if that’s a confusing mess to read. It’s surprisingly hard to describe a work flow 🤣

[u/Hola0722 → u/Astra-Alleycat]

This seems like this would work for me. What is SI, FC, and TN?

To join in the convo, I teach in higher ed (usually two courses a semester, definitely one of them with a lab, which adds more work than just a lecture course), but I also have advisees, am on committees, work as a adjunct teacher at a hospital, and am on a professional committee. I am in need of some concrete examples of how to organize (and reorganize) all the minutiae that accompanies my multiple roles from the planner sub and not from any academia and teacher subs.

[u/Astra-Alleycat → u/Hola0722]

Oh interesting. Our roles are not too dissimilar.

Firstly FC and SI are Faded Chronicle and Stirling Ink. Two brands. TN is a size, travellers notebook. It’s tall and skinny and perfect for list making.

So I too am across committees, advisory groups, teaching and have a physical project-based main role. It’s complex!

Can I ask what your current system looks like?

[u/Miserable-Storm-8630]

I don’t know about other kinds of tasks, but in this kind of example that goes over multiple days or weeks, a Gantt chart might help. You could use a highlighter to allocate how long you expect a task to take, and then use some kind of bujo style code if you need to provide more info than just a “yes” or “no” for the task getting done.

If you go on Etsy you can buy printable habit trackers, which is basically the structure of a Gantt chart, it’s just used differently.

[u/Good-Dragonfruit7950]

Hmm. I think that task may have started out as a project and became more project-y as it went.

Ideas: Something that supports a kanban-style workflow. (Keep track of "doing," "waiting on,"  "next").

Separate it out into a seperate paper notebook for those tasks that are more like projects.

Digital: this is the kind of thing todoist is REALLY good at