My System For Staying Organized At Work

Being organized is a skill I personally value and at least for me - it’s a no-brainer that being organized can help everyone do their jobs better. It was important for me to stay organized when I was an IC (individual contributor) engineer and I’ve found that it’s even more important as an engineering manager. I wanted to write down how I (try to) stay organized at work.

Trello

I use Trello as my todo list for anything work-related. I have a single board set up in Trello that acts as my todo list and while there are several different columns in there (TODO; Lower priority TODOs; To Read/Watch/Learn; and a few others) 99% of the time the only column I look at is the first column, which is my TODO column. I’m a big believer in simplicity and at this point in time I’m convinced that a single column TODO list is the way to go for most people. The column is more or less sorted in a priority order and so anytime I add something to this column, I add it in the right priority order spot. FYI, at the moment I have 23 things in this column, which is a bit too many for me but not terrible. On good days I’ll have maybe <= 10 things in this column but on most days I have a couple dozen things in this column. Anytime I finish a task in the column, I archive the card so that I don’t have to look at it again. When I notice/feel that my column is growing too long, I book an hour or two on my calendar to knock out things in the list.

I have my todo Trello board showing up on my screen nearly 100% of the time (FYI I extend my laptop’s display onto my iPad using Apple’s Sidecar and on my iPad is where I always have my Trello board up). I’ve found that if the todo list is not always in my face, it’s too easy for me to ignore what’s in the list.

Email (Outlook)

Back when we were all on Gmail at work (which I still really miss) I used to have a slightly more complicated system for managing my emails–primarily because the auto-filtering & labeling feature in Gmail works really well. We’re now on Outlook and my opinion (which I’m sure is shared by many people) is that Outlook is clunky and periodically likes to get in the way of productivity. This is where simplicity is yet again important for me. In Outlook I have a folder named Misc and pretty much every one of my emails that I decide to keep goes into this folder. I’ve found that the search functionality in Outlook works well enough that I can rely on it to retrieve emails I’m looking for and so I’ve had zero desire (nor need) to break my emails out into multiple folders. Over the years as more and more asynchronous communication has shifted from emails to Slack I’m finding that I’m spending a lot less time searching for old email messages and rather I’m doing a lot more searching through messages in Slack.

At the moment I have 31 emails in my inbox, which isn’t too bad for me. On good days I have zero emails in my inbox and even on bad days I probably have less than 50 emails in my inbox. As soon as I look at an email that’s sitting in my inbox - I will either A) delete it B) move it to my Misc folder if I want to save the email C) Reply to the email (and then move it to Misc) if it’s going to take me a less than a minute to respond or D) keep it in there if it’s going to take a bigger chunk of my time to reply/think about it.

Slack

I spend a ton of time in Slack while working and it’s not infrequent that I will get inundated with messages. Here are a few things I do to stay organized in Slack and not let it overwhelm me.

• Mark unread: The Mark unread feature is one of my favorite features in Slack and I was so happy when I was able to do this with threads as well. Whenever I’m reading through messages but don’t have time to catch myself up on all unread messages in a given channel or threads, I mark messages as unread so that when I have time to come back to it later on I know where to start reading from.

• Reduce rapid back & forths: As much as I dislike doing this I’m often needing to jump from one thing to another while working. It’s not infrequent that while I’m typing up a message in Slack I need to jump onto something else right away. Something that I’ve found helpful is to change the setting in Slack so that when the enter/return key is pressed on the keyboard it adds a new line instead of sending a message (Preferences > Advanced > Under When writing a message, press Enter to... select Start a new line). This makes it just a little bit easier to compose one intelligent message that captures all of what I want to communicate and reduces rapid back & forth pinging in Slack which I tend not to like.

• Mute channels: A bunch of (low priority) Slack channels I’m in are muted and inside of a folder that is almost always collapsed - which means that these channels are almost always out of my sight (and my mind). This has been helpful for me in reducing unwanted noise and staying organized in Slack. I suppose I could leave some of these channels but I find that because I still interact with these channels from time to time, I find it easier to just stay in these channels rather than joining/leaving these channels repeatedly.

Apple Notes app

I keep all of my private notes in the Apple Notes app. While it’s certainly not the most feature-rich notes tool out there I like that it’s simple, reliable, and provides me with just enough capability to keep things organized into different folders. On average, 90% of my time inside Notes is spent in a single note that’s titled General Notes where in the very top of the notes, it has a bullet point list of things I want to share/announce during an upcoming daily standup with my team - and down below contains a long list of notes I take and keep for myself.

Atom & Piece of paper

Any notes I (think I might) want to keep basically forever - I enter them into Apple Notes. And then there’s another category of notes that I know I’m not going to want/need to keep around beyond just the moment. These often tend to be things I write down for myself to help me think better. These sorts of notes are usually entered into a text editor (I use Atom) or a piece of paper, which I always have on my desk.

• 2023 2
• 2021 6
• 2019 1
• 2018 5
• 2017 9
• 2016 25
• 2015 6
• 2014 6
• 2013 15
• 2012 16
• 2011 8
• 2010 13