Ask HN: How do you keep a list of task? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you keep a list of task?

5 pointslexmo676 comments

I recently switched jobs and this is the first time that I work in a company where I have to send out daily reports. Every few months I'll have performance reports, and those reports can influence my paycheck.

How can I keep list of daily tasks and is there an easy way to somehow assign value (weight) to them so that when the time of yearly review comes I know what are my biggest accomplishments?

We don't use system like Jira so I don't have a task list. Not everything that I work on has a GitHub issue. Code related stuff has, but speaking at meetups or writing blog posts comes without a GitHub issue.

Do you have any tips for me? I'm pretty bad at showing my work. For me it is all days work. I don't know how to emphasize something.

Sounds like you want some kind of logging system? I do it by sending weekly status reports addressed to myself. "Hello bjourne, this week you cut the runtime of the simulator in half using pthreads. You also worked on the deployment server, but was stuck cause it lacked some packages and you didn't have root privileges. ..."

I try not to overcomlicate it so I use Notepad++. New day ==> new tab and I list everything I plan do that day, including meeting notes. If you need to weight it you can put a number after each task is done. You can create a report once every week into a nice excel sheet or in whatever your higherups preference.

I use a combination of a Kanban board (Kanboard) and Time Recording (clockify.me) then you have quite some statistics for performance reports and a structured plan for future tasks.

At my last job, I had started to keep a separate set of notes for this. I would update it at the end of every sprint. It's cumbersome but it needs to be done.

You could look at task warrior+time warrior. Another thing that exists is toggl, but that is mainly for tracking time if I'm not mistaken.

I personally use clickup, it is great platform.

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