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Being employed at (technically) a startup, each employee on our IT team touches almost every system and piece of hardware. I like that, and I’m getting experience not many people get this early in their careers. I do, however, find myself getting unorganized at times because of it, and things tend to fall through the cracks here and there. There’s only so much SpiceWorks can do to keep you on track, and I find Outlook reminders and tasks clunky to keep me in check.

I recently started making myself a list of everything I need to to in a notebook. It’s alright, but I’m sure there’s better ways. Also tried using Project and it’s too much for just daily tasks that i need to cross off when completed.

What tools (software, notebooks, etc.) do you all use to keep yourself on schedule and stay organized?

7 Spice ups
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This video pretty much changed the way I do stuff, at work and at home – for short-term task management.

https://youtu.be/Qo7vUdKTlhDavid Allen’s Presents %22Getting Things Done%22 (GTD) to Google Staff David Allen’s Presents “Getting Things Done” (GTD) to Google Staff

Pair GTD with Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” to manage the long-term vision for your department, life, etc., and you’re on your way.

The thing I like about both Covey and Allen is their focus on principles for managing your time and your life. They don’t push a particular product as the “must-have” crux of the entire program.

Don’t get lost in the weeds of finding the perfect to-do list. Focus on your methodology and everything else will fall into place.

3 Spice ups
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Personally, Google Suite works for me.

Documentation organized in Drive, tasks set up in Gmail or reminders in Calendar, notes in Google Keep.

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Get important little things done right away, don’t let them build up into hundreds of little things that renders your worklist worthlessly intimidating.

Use the 80/20 rule - keep doing the important stuff, the rest tend to disappear as facts on the ground change.

Don’t allow too much time for jobs - we tend to take as long doing jobs as we have allowed for them.

Highly subjective of course, just my two cents.

P.S. from observation, people that use all sorts of fancy software and methodologies tend to be looking for an external miracle solution to a basic lack of discipline and spend years jumping from one system to the next. Much like dieting.

1 Spice up
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An ever growing knowledge base, Spiceworks ticketing system and Microsoft One Note. Plus Outlook calendar is pretty useful.

2 Spice ups
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I’ve been using Asana & Slack recently, in conjunction with our small IT Team and 3rd Party Contractors it’s worked well on a current project. Slack has been used like an IM/communication client for quick solutions & chat, and Asana as more of a project management tool & checklist - it’s proven more useful than I anticipated, and separates the project away from normal tickets/email for us.

1 Spice up
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Honestly, I can’t believe I didn’t even think of OneNote. I use it for quick notes here and there for documentation purposes, but I may be using it more now. Thanks for the reminder!

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One note is a very powerful tool. I sync all my notes from every employment I have had over the past 5 years. All my documentation (relative of course) from it has been banged into the knowledge base, giving others answers to issues they couldn’t find.

One Note isn’t the easiest program to navigate at times especially if you have tonnes of information like myself, but also it needs a good clear out and/or organizing correctly to be very useful. I like it on my mobile as well (iPhone 5s and Galaxy S6) so if I am out and about I can just take quick notes as and when needed.

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Teamwork is one of my favourites to use. It’s simple, you can add team members too it, and its task & calendar feature helps me sort my life quickly and efficiently.

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Hi there,

Office 365 is one of the best options available currently in the market – you get everything that you need to organize your business hours and share content between your coworkers (including real Office applications).

An app called Planner was created exactly for tasks management and should solve your problems with organizing your very own schedule. You can put many categories of the stuff you are doing and still have a nice clear view of this what needs to be done, has been done already or what should take most of your attention.

Another quite popular alternative is called Asana – this is also a task management platform; however, it does not include business-class email or calendars, but then it is available for free. I have tried it myself and I must say it offers nice experience.

Hope this helps.

All the best,
Adam

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Tom Limoncelli’s Time Management for System Administrators is well-known. (Limoncelli is a former Googler himself.) Can find many YouTube vids of him talking about the topic & book—

Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen has added resources noted below. Not specifically I.T., but very applicable—

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Offering another perspective, one of the first things I do is establish a routine. I tend to fall apart if I don’t have a routine set up for my everyday tasks. Once that falls into place, everything else tends to as well.

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For ongoing projects visualise and prioritise them using Kanban (trello.com being a good tool.).

For daily repetitive tasks, look to automation to solve them if you can.

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So many options. Maybe look at Jira Core - the project management job part; it’s fairly simple but that’s what makes it easy to work with. Something like Basecamp might work too, but I don’t know what your collaborative needs are. Both of them are web based and have free trial periods, so you might as well have a look.