Task Management — What do you actually need to know?

There are so many different opinions out there on how to write, track and organise your tasks. For me, it has been a really useful exercise to bring all of this together. This is my attempt to clear up some of the fog that gets created by all the different ideas out there. Many of these ideas are presented with such certainty of their importance, they become hard to resist. So, task management — what do you actually need to know?

What I am not going to do is propose some slick and sophisticated organisational system or talk about any kind of specific app that you need to use. I am going much more basic than that. What do you actually need to know about a task? If you ever plan to get anything done, what does your task management system actually need to tell you about the tasks in it?

I have distilled all the ideas on this down to a list of 6 core things. And, in order of importance here is the list. I say, in order of importance, that’s a little arbitrary and the lower down the list you get, there’s not really much in it.

1. What the task is
2. When does it need to be done
3. When it can be done
4. When you want to do it
5. What it relates to
6. How important it is (this one could be much higher…