Productivity for Product Managers — Choosing the Best Task Management App
In my last article I talked about my productivity setup which helps me manage my time efficiently.
If you would like to have a quick read, please click here — Link. I never anticipated that article to get as much traction as it did. The attention it got shows that the struggle to manage time effectively is real for product managers and that we are constantly looking for ways to up our productivity game.
In short the setup worked something like this
Aha! ← → JIRA ← → Slack ← → Todoist
As with anything in life, I have constantly been looking at ways to redefine my productivity setup with new techniques and tools. I have recently changed the setup to something that looks like this.
Aha! ← → JIRA ← → Slack ← → Quire ← → Google Calendar ← → Notion
[Idea Management ← → Design/Development ← →Asynchronous communication ← → Task Management ← → Time Management ← → Note Taking]
To explain this setup I would need a separate detailed post. In this article however, I am focused on discussing why I have included Quire as my new task management app and how to go about selecting one.
Why do we need a task management application
In one of the Product Management groups I am part of, a fellow Product Manager, seeked a solution to a problem. It was an all too familiar problem that many of us face everyday.
More than the question, what intrigued me were the various responses. Each of the Product Managers explained how they tackled this problem using their own techniques — using sticky notes, regular pen & paper, using trello, slack notify me feature, marking it unread, one note, google keep and even using google search to record the tasks.
Even I chipped in with my own recommendation of using todoist. However, It was interesting to note the many different ways the same problem gets solved. As long as it works, one can follow any system. Ultimately what matters is that — it should work.
In my opinion, a task management app is suited precisely to manage problems such as above. Our brain should not be tasked with remembering the many tasks to do. Instead of focusing on the ‘what’ and ‘when’ part, it is best to let the brain focus on the ‘how’ part.
We should delegate the work of remembering the ‘what’ and ‘when’ to a Task Manager.
Todoist is one of the leading task management apps. It is indeed one of the best. The reason I moved to Quire is not because Todoist was because Quire all of what Todoist offered for free while being incredibly intuitive.
When choosing a task management app, I am looking for the below capabilities.
- Ability to add a task quickly. (Possibly with one click)
- Add a due date and time
- Set a reminder
- Add comments and attachments if needed
- Is Cross platform
- Integration to my calendar and other systems in my ecosystem.
The point 5 is one of the most critical ones. And to my surprise, Quire gives all of the above for free and is cross platform.
Given the many integrations Quire offers, I am able to integrate Quire with Gmail, Google calendar, Slack.
So any new mail that needs my attention can be added with a few clicks to quire as a task with a date. And this also gets added to the calendar automatically. And any other calendar entry also gets added to quire because its synchronized with Quire.
And any slack notification can also be added to Quire from within a slack channel. While it is not as intuitive with slack integration as Todoist, it still works. If you can use a service like Zappier you can get any other integrations working as well.
While a lot of this work might look like an overkill for you at this moment, you need to keep in mind that all these are one time setup activities. And once done, the ease of work and speed increase manifold. You are always looking for reducing meaningless repetitive work. By using intelligent integration, we reduce that many manual error prone menial work.
If you didn’t have such smart integration you might end up manually re-creating tasks in different applications that would totally negate any benefit the tool would have brought in terms of efficiency. Imagine checking your mail and then logging into quire to manually create a task for the mail, then manually adding a calendar entry to ensure you don’t forget. That would be such a pain.
I have a separate ‘Personal’ and ‘Professional’ workspace in Quire that keeps my tasks neatly segregated. And I am able to add tasks both manually and also from other apps like Slack, Gmail, Calendar. And for each task I am able to add a priority, date and tags. And it offers multiple ways of visualizing my to-dos either in a list or in Kanban mode. At its basic a task management app allows us to visualize the various tasks that need our attention so we can plan the optimized way of getting things done. A paper or sticky notes wouldn’t be efficient.
Hopefully this has been of some use to you. In my next post, I will explain how Quire fits into my overall workflow and how well it helps me manage my work. Hopefully that should help you plan a system that works for you as well. Thank you for reading!
