Remembering to Follow Up

We've all struggled with our to-do lists. The core of my current method came about in 2012 when I was drowning in tasks. I was leading 10 different projects simultaneously, and often I would ask someone for information and then never get a response back. I realized that I needed to consolidate all my various task lists into one place and be reminded if I hadn't heard back from someone. I ended up using Microsoft Outlook.

Like many large corporations, we were a Microsoft Office organization so I already had all of my emails in Outlook. The neat trick with Outlook is that you can "flag" emails for follow-up (for you or for your recipients) and those flags will show up in your task list, along with any non-email tasks you put in. Because so many of my inquiries were via email, and many of my tasks were answering emails from my management or customers, I could simply flag an email rather than write up an action item in a separate program. And the real beauty was that before I sent the email, I could with a few clicks set a reminder to follow up if I hadn't heard back. If I was writing my supply chain lead to ask if we'd gotten quotes back on a new part number, I could write the email and then think, "when do I need to know?" and "when is a reasonable response time?". I'd then set the flag for the same day or the day after I expected the response. If I got the response back before then, I could either act on it immediately and mark the action complete ahead of schedule, or simply file the response until my flag popped up and perform the task then.

I took advantage of a few other features to keep myself sane. The first was that if a task wasn't listed as past-due or due today, I ignored it and trusted "past Adam" to not have set me up to miss deadlines. Second was that when I pulled up my original email from the task list, my first step was normally to hit "reply all". Before you hiss at me for using the dreaded function, I didn't SEND the email. But Outlook would say "Hey, you're replying to an old email, do you want to pull up the most recent one?" And blam, I had whatever the latest was on that task so I could act on it. If Outlook DIDN'T give me that alert, then I needed to poke at the person again to remind them I was waiting on them. And that reminder email (if I didn't go in person, send a instant message, call, etc.) became the new email on my task list.

When I got into the office each morning, I would lay out my day.  When I worked onsite, I would print the daily agenda from Outlook which would already include my appointments and tasks for the day (or at least the first 17; I'd have to hand-write in the rest). After I started working remotely, I made myself a small whiteboard (plastic stand I had from a Kickstarter, plastic transparency from a report cover, and some lined paper) and wrote out the hours of the day on the left and task list on the right. Meetings would get blocked off and tasks for the day would go between meetings. There would also be some blocks I'd leave open deliberately for meals and on the assumption that something else would come up. Tasks I wanted to get done during a meeting would get written into that meeting (e.g. "I emailed this person but I can follow up since they'll be in the meeting with me") and I'd check off my tasks as I went. Tasks don't fit on the calendar for the day? Better reschedule something because it's not all getting done. Didn't finish a task when you thought you would? Mark it with a red dot so if you have slack later in the day you can come back to it. Laying out my day like this got me in the right headspace to know what I was facing that day, and kept me on-task so I always knew what I was doing next and could ignore the items that were scheduled later.

My blank schedule for the day. Each line is a half-hour, with the daily hours 8-4:30 written down the left side and a task count down the right side. For days with more than 17 tasks, tasks 18-34 go just to the left of the numbers. The task count helps me check that I actually copied everything from the Outlook list for the day

As time went on, I refined the process. Around this time I also started consolidating all of my notes into Microsoft OneNote: either typing them in directly or scanning them in and annotating them for searchability. OneNote integrates with Outlook so you can highlight a line from your notes and add an Outlook task which then links back to those notes. This is great for when you're in a meeting and catch an action: make the notes on what you need to do, create a task for when you need to do it, and then forget about it until the assigned time. The link means that you can trigger your memory on what you were supposed to do.

Here's the same board with some dummied-in information. 9-9:30 I worked on a task "Done", which I then checked off. I was supposed to work on the task "Past due" 9:30-10, but didn't finish it so out comes the red marker. I have a meeting 10-11, so that gets a bracket to help me distinguish meetings from times that I've scheduled tasks. On the right are 4 tasks, with blue dots next to the three tasks that were scheduled on the board. #2 "Get a job" isn't on the board yet, so if I'm laying out a schedule that should alert me to either shoehorn in the task somewhere or push it out to the next day.

I also started keeping my various team meeting notes in OneNote. OneNote has an "add calendar details from Outlook" button that pulls in the meeting title, date, invitee list, and meeting description. To take attendance I'd show the invitee list and then highlight in green everyone who joined. I'd then take the agenda for the meeting (often copied directly from the previous meeting's minutes) and put it into the body of the OneNote page. I'd share my screen with all attendees so they could see me taking notes in real time and correct me on spelling, if I'd misinterpreted an update, or if I wasn't being clear in the notes. At the end of the meeting, I'd email the page to all meeting attendees (either via OneNote or doing a "reply all" to the meeting notice in Outlook and pasting in the minutes). So I'd have notes for my own memory and have sent out meeting minutes to everyone with minimal incremental effort. I often got thankful responses from regular attendees who couldn't make the meeting that time or managers of attendees who told me they'd followed up with their team because of something they saw in the minutes. And like above, if I needed to do something as a result of the call, I'd flag the line so I would remember to do it.

A few years ago, Microsoft rolled out To Do which is supposed to consolidate all those tasks. A phone app wasn't available for the higher-security versions of Office 365 (we were on the "GCC High" plan which ensures that data stays within the United States and is suitable for US military contractors), but it turns out that the mobile browser version did work. So when I started my computer in the morning and was waiting for it to finish booting, I could pull up my calendar on my phone and copy in the meetings, then open up the browser shortcut for To Do and write in my tasks, and lay out my day on my whiteboard while the computer chugged through its startup routine.

If your to-do list method works for you, great! But I strongly recommend having something that lets you put a date on a task where you can ignore it until your system tells you that it's time do work on the task, and then can provide the context on what you need to do. I found Outlook + OneNote + To Do kept me sane when there were far too many tasks to keep in my head.

In the words of Indiana Jones, Sr., "I wrote it down in my diary so I wouldn't HAVE to remember!" 

If you have any comments, please reach out to me at blog@saprobst.com or this page is cross-posted at LinkedIn and you can leave a comment there.