The 23 stages of the task management software lifecycle

March 14, 2013

  1. Totally on top of all pending tasks
  2. Moderate slippage of select tasks leads to mild anxiety
  3. Catastrophic failure to complete one or more mission-critical tasks leads to wholesale re-evaluation of career choice, self-worth and why are we even on this earth anyhow?
  4. Application of medication, coaching and/or psychotherapy scales existential crisis back to actionable item: adopt new task management system
  5. All tasks put on hold for 3-14 days while documenting software requirements and researching available options
  6. Software selection creates brief window for completion of most-urgent tasks
  7. Installation of software across all desktop and mobile devices
  8. Optional: acquisition of any additional hardware devices or accessories that are revealed to be vitally necessary [read: nifty] in light of new task management software choice
  9. Troubleshooting of cloud-based cross-device task synchronization
  10. Capture of top-of-mind tasks
  11. Blissful peace of knowing all crucial tasks are captured
  12. Hey! all this blissful peace helped me remember the 27 other tasks I keep forgetting about
  13. Contact high from daily experience of checking off task checkboxes
  14. Evangelization of preferred task management solution to foolish friends and colleagues with their hopelessly antiquated systems
  15. Significant financial and/or temporal investment in software, workflows or custom hacks on the Best. Task. Management. System. Ever.
  16. Religious daily capture and review of all current tasks
  17. Religious daily capture of all potential tasks
  18. Gosh there sure are a lot of tasks in there
  19. Minor failure of task completion due to task management software avoidance
  20. Capture of project or event-specific task list in a separate app or document, where it won’t get lost in that big, overwhelming, depressing list of tasks
  21. Important tasks captured in emails to self so that they won’t get lost in the morass of recorded tasks
  22. Realization that completion of task list will require 8,918 hours worth of work leads to total avoidance of task management application
  23. Moderate task slippage (repeat from step #2 above)

2 Comments

  1. aaron pettigrew
    aaron pettigrew on March 27, 2013 at 1:42 pm

    *Numbers 5-9 may optionally be farmed out to junior members of your staff, who of course will add them to their own task list which they may or may not be tracking by means of a tattered rich-text document that lives on their desktop, and who of course will present their findings in a series of meetings, in each of which you will all, whilst eating some kind of exciting ethnic food, dream up and agree upon new and increasingly complex requirements for the ideal task manager until many months later it is finally decided that the original task management solution you were using is still, in fact, the best option available, at which time it will of course be discovered, sadly, that said solution is, in actual fact, no longer available.

  2. Anonymous
    Anonymous on October 14, 2014 at 6:22 am

    Pretty right.
    I think individual need to face that he can’t complete all the tasks in list NEVER. Even if they are planned really good.
    And it will be same despite type of tool you are using.