Experiment: Separate Work and Personal Task Management

Description

Date Started: 2022-08-22 Mon

Up until now, I’ve been keeping all of my tasks for both work and personal life in a single instance of Things 3, my task manager of choice, on my iPad. I wanted there to be one central place where I managed all my tasks so I could see everything I needed to do in a day. The issue with this is I have all the other pieces of my productivity system, such as calendar and email, separated because those are all provided to me by the company I work for. I therefore don’t get the benefits of being able to link tasks in Things to work emails and calendar events. I decided to experiment with separating out my work tasks from my personal tasks so I could gain those benefits, plus I’m hoping it’ll help me focus better based on context (work on work things during work since those are the only tasks I’m seeing on my work computer, etc).

Update / Results

Date Updated / Finished: 2022-10-20 Thu

After having my work and personal tasks being separated out into two separate instances of Things, I've decided to merge them back together. I found I was forgetting to look at my work instance of Things all the time, and kept missing time sensitive tasks. Having all my tasks in a single instance of Things was much more efficient. It's really easy to apply labels to tasks in Things, so if I'm worried about context, I can apply work labels to work tasks, and filter my list down in order to see just those tasks. I really didn't gain any benefits from having them separated, just further complicated my productivity system by having tasks in multiple places. The less things to juggle in my productivity system the better.