Managing My Workflow in 2010

I’ve been quite busy this week: new clients, tons of leads to follow up on, playing with WordPress 3.0 and Fat Free CRM, etc. Working at capacity these last several days has made me appreciate more than ever the tools I use to manage my personal workflow, tracking actionable items from receipt to milestones to completion to followup.

Essentially, I have a handful of specialized inboxes for receiving new information:

1. My Gmail account. I’ve used the same email address since the early days of Gmail beta, and it aggregates my dozen other addresses. I have about 40 filters set up to delete bulk mail, and more importantly, mark automatic mail (database backups, reports from work, etc.) as read, since I will need these messages one day – just not anytime soon.
2. My newsfeeds. I have about 1,000 news items a week coming into Vienna from sites such as Ars Technica, Craigslist, and TED.
3. My physical notes, whether taken on my iPod Touch or on paper (yuck!). This is a much smaller basket of information, but you can bet that something is important if I bother to write it down!
4. Receipts. I like to buy things…not a lot of things, but I have gotten into the habit of eating. I also like to track every penny that I spend, so consequentially, I generate a fair amount of receipts every week.
5. Files. Not really an inbox, per se, but I do need universal internet access to my files, just as if they were an emails in Gmail.

For each of these inboxes, I have a specific processing method:

1. New emails either get starred or not starred, depending if I need to act/follow up on them or not. I have friends who swear by the labeling system, but I personally don’t see the point. I have actionable items, and these actionable items have deadlines. Does it really matter if the item falls under “Freelance” or under “Things To Buy,” since I don’t plan on missing the deadline either way? The number of starred emails has never exceeded one page (25 emails) under my workflow, as I transfer items requiring significant actions to Remember the Milk (RTM), which then syncs with iCal to provide me with a visual layout of how to allocate my time.
2. I check my newsfeeds in the morning and evening, skimming through the headlines. I open anything that requires further reading in Google Chrome and either process it on the spot or mark it for later via Read It Later.
3. Physical notes get recorded into RTM every evening, with a deadline set for either a deliverable that I need to produce or with a time for me to revisit the item. All entries in RTM are sorted as “Academic,” “Projects,” or “Personal.”
4. I enter my receipts into iCompta every other night and reconcile on the spot, holding a receipt until it is reconciled.
5. All my current files are placed in my “Documents” folder, which syncs automatically and instantly with Dropbox.

All of these programs are absolutely free for personal use (with the exception of iCompta, which charges for its latest version…I haven’t upgraded, though.) The result of this workflow? I have never missed a deadline, forgotten to reply to an email in a timely fashion, or lost important data. This method certainly isn’t the only way to manage one’s time, and maybe it’s not even the best, but it works very well for me since it costs no money and requires minimal “administrative” downtime for processing items – maybe 1.5 hours total per week.

There are also three relatively new (for me) programs that I’ve been experimenting with. I haven’t figured out yet how to integrate them into my workflow, but I still feel they’re worth mentioning:

• ZohoCRM for managing contacts, leads, opportunities, and accounts;
• Sosius for project management; and
• MindNode for mindmapping.

…and on a personal note, I’ve been getting excellent usage out of SuperCook for dealing with that eating habit I mentioned earlier. =)