Tasks you actually finish

A task is something you do, on a day

That sounds obvious and it's exactly where it goes wrong. "Follow up Baker" isn't a task: it doesn't say what you do or when. It sits there because you have to think about it first every time you look, and thinking is what you've stopped doing by a quarter past four.

"Ring Peter Baker about the quote, Tuesday" is a task. You see it and you know straight away whether you can do it now.

Three things have to be in there: what you do, with whom, and on what day. Miss one and it isn't a task, it's an intention.

One owner, even when there are two of you

A task with no name on it gets done by nobody. In a firm of five it feels excessive to put an owner on everything — everyone knows who does what anyway — but small teams are exactly where it goes wrong, on the assumption that the other person had it.

That doesn't cost you a deal because someone was lazy; it costs you one because two people each thought it was sorted. One name prevents that, and that's all it takes.

Why a task sits there

If something has been there a fortnight, it's almost always one of these three:

1. It's too big. "Write the quote for Hollis" is an afternoon's work, not a task. Break it down until something's left that fits in twenty minutes: "look up prices for Hollis".
2. It isn't yours. You need information from someone else and you haven't got it. The real task is "ask Nadia for the site details", and only then can the other thing happen.
3. You don't want to do it. Usually a phone call you'd rather put off. That isn't a planning problem; you solve it by doing it first thing tomorrow, before you open anything else.

What to do with the overdue ones

A list of thirty overdue tasks can't be rescued by working harder. Do this once, and after that never at this scale again:

Go through them and ask one question per line: am I genuinely going to do this this week? If not, choose between binning it and giving it a new date. Binning is nearly always right — if something could sit for three weeks with no consequences, it wasn't a task, it was a thought.

What's left is a list that's true, and a list that's true is one you will open in the morning.

The one rule that keeps it going

After every conversation: three lines and a next step with a date. That's the whole habit, and it does two things at once — your records stay accurate and your task gets created at the moment you still know why.

Make the task later and you have to reconstruct the conversation, at which point it becomes "follow up" instead of something concrete. More on this in the piece on what to write down after a call.