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Hey Founders! What is your favorite way to visualize and prioritize your tasks?

I'm finding as my businesses grow, that visualizing & prioritizing them is harder and harder.

I have:

  • a consulting business with 4 employees.
  • launched a smaller eCommerce business this year(no employees)

There are tons of tasks that go with both of those, and i'm trying to learn more about visualizing everything possible, so i don't miss opportunities, but then balancing the prioritization.

any insights and advice would be great.

  1. 1

    I tend to use post-it’s for day of tasks and notion.so for future tasks

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    Check out Week Plan (https://weekplan.net) my product. It is a weekly planner inspired by the 7 habits of highly effective people.

    It helps keep some perspective over what you do.

    It also has the concept of roles (hats or business functions) to visually see every aspect of your life or business.

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    Basecamp recently introduced interesting visualization. It's applicable if you strive to see the project from the helicopter view.

    I'll just paste their explanation here:
    Every piece of work has two phases. First there’s an uphill phase where you figure out your approach. You have a basic idea about the task, but you haven’t figured out what the solution is going to look like or how to solve all the unknowns.

    Eventually you reach a point where there aren’t any more unsolved problems. That’s like standing at the top of the hill. You can see clearly all the way down the other side. Then the downhill phase is just about execution.

    It's called Hill Chart.
    https://basecamp.com/features/hill-charts

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    I switched to Notion after trying out most of the tools out there.

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    Someone on IH just told me about "Swim Lanes" in Kanbans. I think it might help with prioritization: https://zenkit.com/en/blog/dive-into-better-task-management-with-kanban-swimlanes/

    I built Brisa Boards because of a similar problem to you (as well as just writing stuff down in docs that I'd rarely look at). I wouldn't say it's quite "there" yet, but it's getting close. It's open source and there's an easy to try demo on the home page :)

    In my app, I use a whiteboard (it's like a visual board where you just drag cards around), then certain cards get turned into kanbans or sheets. And I can nest them within each other.

    Prioritization is still tough for me. Sometimes I use sheets to prioritize, but I usually have a card with a description with a list of my top priorities at the moment.

    I feel like with big stuff like building a business, there's multiple chickens and eggs haha. Like I need to work on my copy before I publish more, but I need to publish more to get feedback, and I need to make more features before it's good enough. But I'm getting better at it.

  6. 1

    Just got started with Trello again myself with various boards such as website, marketing, launches, etc even for my personal stuff I have a separate account. It just works. No messing about. When I first started I just offloaded all my thoughts and random scribblings there and now I've made it a regular habit to maintain and use it. Treat your Trello board(s) like a MVP. I keep improving mine all the time. Remember to keep track of what's completed either in a separate column or using labels.

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      Yeah my problem with trello is priorities. I don't have a good system for prioritizing trello tasks across business functions.

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        IMO an upgrade to Trello is Pivotal Tracker which I use everyday for just this.

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          for your personal work/business tasks?