Does it happen to you that you hear a new word and all of a sudden you start seeing it everywhere? That’s what happened to me after I listened to the book Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen. Arguably the most important tip in the book is the importance of writing down and constantly reviewing the next actions that have to be completed, but in order to effectively manage you next actions you need to group them together. This naturally leads to the question; what is the best way to group tasks together?

Group by Action Type and/or Location

This is the method that David Allen suggests in his book and it proposes to group tasks by the type of the task at hand. For example phone calls should be grouped together, e-mails together, actions to do at home together, etc. etc. The resultant category list will look something like:

• Phone Calls
• E-mails
• Desk Actions
• Home
• Database Updates

Group by Importance

This is a method proposed by Stephen Covey and it proposes to divide tasks according to their importance and urgency. A task can be either one of the following:

• Important and Urgent
• Important and Not Urgent
• Not Important and Urgent
• Not Important and Not Urgent

Group by Project

This method is what I was using before I started paying attention to this problem and it lists the actions assigned to a particular project. The resultant category list will be identical to the list of projects that you need to complete.

Group by your role for the completion of the task

I found this categorisation in an article about Task Management on the Keen PDA site. In this method you categorise tasks by the role that you must take to complete the task, so the category list will be something like:

• Husband
• Father
• Manager
• Co-worker

From all these different task categorisation methods which is likely to give the best results? From the past experience trying to use the different methods I’m arriving to the conclusion that each of the different methods has something different to offer and like most situations the best approach would be to adopt a mixture of methods.

I think that Stephen Covey’s task importance assignment can easily be adopted with either the Group by Action type or the Group by project type because it can act as a prioritisation mechanism for both categorisations. My current list of categories looks something like this:-

• Important and Urgent – Next Actions that need my immediate attention
• Lazy Tasks – Non critical important tasks that need little or no brain power
• Phone Calls and Mails
• Web Browsing – List of sites that I need to look into
• Mindspill – Possible new post topics and enhancements
• 3 Other projects – Project specific next actions

Have you ever given a thought on how to categorise your tasks, if so I’d be more than happy to hear your opinions?

My next task now will be finding a good super cross platform task management software tool that can happily work on my work PC running Windows, my mobile PDA running Palm, my home PC running Windows and the other home PC running Linux. I might be asking for too much at this point.