Creating a task management system for people managers (using Notion)
A task-management system based around people, commitments, and follow-ups to help build trust with your team. (Notion template included.)
A task-management system based around people, commitments, and follow-ups
I’ve tried many attempts at task management in the past, and they often work for a few weeks, but rarely stick. As an individual contributor, this was not a critical problem most of the time. I had JIRA tickets or kick-off documents to refer to, and established ways of working with product teams that would keep me pointed in the right direction toward delivery. I’d been doing this long enough that I could muddle my way through most projects based on my team relationships and the structure around me, with more granular task management being a nice-to-have.
When I transitioned to a management position though, this fell apart quickly. Suddenly most of my work day was structured around 1:1 meetings, or smallish meetings with stakeholders. Success became less about delivering tangible outputs, and more about connecting people, building trust, and working on ideas often well before they become formal structured projects.
I started to notice a pattern in my own work as I became more comfortable with management ways of working. I was pretty good at talking through problems in 1:1s, coaching people, offering feedback, but when it came to following up on actions or discussions from previous meetings, I was dropping the ball. This meant trust was slowly eroding. I found that the managers I worked the best with were excellent at following up, and I wanted to be one of those managers.
After a bit of experimentation with a variety of fairly standard todo list apps and approaches, attempts to use my calendar in place of a task list, collaborative task lists and shared agendas in Asana, I decided I needed to approach it like I would any other design problem, and start with my actual needs:
My requirements were:
I must be able to prioritize all my tasks in a single ranked list relative to one another so I have clear priorities.
I must be able to see what actions/updates relate to an individual so I know who to follow up with, and can prioritize effectively based on upcoming touch-points with people.
I should be able to see the things I’ve done each week to track progress over time, and feel a sense of accomplishment when I mark something as done.
I should enjoy using it. It can’t be more effort to maintain than the value it affords me.
The template
After some experimenting with different tools, I found Notion to be the best fit for me personally. This approach may work in similar apps such as Asana, but I was already using Notion for other information management, so it made sense for me.
The template is 3 custom views on top of a Notion database. Each view targets slightly different use cases, which are detailed below.
Get the task management template
(Open and duplicate to your Notion space)
1:1s view
This is a board view with columns that indicate the status of an item, and a grouped row per person. Here I can hide all the noise by collapsing everyone’s row, and then just show/hide the row I need to when taking notes in a 1:1 or preparing an agenda. The columns per person are “To discuss”, “Todo (Me)”, Todo (Them)”, “Update”, and “Done”.
The morning of my 1:1s I’ll try to look over all the columns for a person and copy those items to a shared agenda (we use Google Calendar/Docs’s integrated “Meeting notes” feature for shared agendas now).
If you wanted to, you could look into automating things here with Zapier or another service, to keep those shared agendas in sync, but for me it’s good to have a manual touchpoint that forces me to review and think about the agendas at the start of a day.
My tasks
The main view I use day to day. This takes the “Todo (Me)” and “Update” columns, and hides everything else. There are no grouping rows here, and items in each column can be prioritized from top to bottom as you see fit, without it affecting the other view.
Tasks here can be a mixture of things that result from conversations, or just individual tasks, so not everything here is assigned to a person, and I can easily add individual tasks using the “+New” button at the bottom of the column.
If a task is read a thing, or review a thing, I’ll try to put the link in the body of the note, so I don’t need to keep a tab open for weeks and inevitably lose it.
Once a task is done, if the person requires an update I’ll move it into the update column. Otherwise I just click into the note and change the status to done, or drag to the “Done” hidden group on the right.
Done
The Done view is a table view that lists everything in “Done” or “Update” (as these are often things I’ve completed a task for but just need to let someone know). The table is grouped by week, based on “Last edited” date.
This view isn’t used often, but it can be nice to review the previous week at the start of the following week.
Supporting processes
Part of what makes this solution work well for me is that other people can’t add actions directly to my task list. This was my biggest issue with Asana: low priority or unrelated items would make their way onto my task list, and managing the noise became a time-sink.
Having said that, others need visibility on the actions/commitments that relate to them, so it’s important that you put aside some time to ensure shared agendas (wherever they live) are kept in sync.
It’s also good to schedule 5 or 10 mins early in the day to sense-check your prioritization, see if anything on your calendar that day needs something to be prioritized higher, or whether there’s stuff that’s been hanging around for a while that can actually quietly drop off.
What I also find helpful is having this page somewhere ever-present so you can manage it quickly. One of the biggest issues with the Notion desktop app is it’s lack of good multitasking, so I often have my desktop app dedicated to this page, and then have Notion open in a tab in my browser for when I need to look stuff up or use other pages.
I hope the approach and template is helpful to other managers or leads out there. Approaches to task management can be incredibly individual, so if this doesn’t work for you, no worries and please do share alternative approaches, or modifications you make to this template that you find helpful.
Originally posted on Medium.