Seriously, imdone

When managing tasks becomes your biggest task

Are you an IT or Business Manager who attends a lot of meetings? Do you take notes, keep to do lists and know what a text editor is? If this sounds like you, then read on because I’m gonna help you save a ton of time and administrative hassle so you can get back to the creative work you love.

Back in 2008 I was promoted to the role of Internet Development Manager at Lands’ End inc. As a developer who liked coding and working with technology, I wasn’t exactly overjoyed with the loads of administrative work that accompanied the management of a 15–20 person team. So I decided to do what I do best. Automate.

At first, I wrote a few apps for people resource allocation to help me with shuffling developers between our portfolio projects. That saved me some time, but my desk was a cluttered mess of post it notes and notebooks with sticky tabs. So I started using a physical kanban board, but the amount of time I spent pulling the tasks out of my notes and managing them to completion was still keeping me from doing deep work. Seriously, I thought, I’m done!

That’s when it came to me. What if I could use a simple adaptation of the markdown link format to identify tasks in my markdown files like this...

- [We need two developers on the super secret project](#doing:)

to create a task in the “doing” list on a virtual kanban board. And do it all while I was taking notes. No more manually sifting through my notes to find and record tasks in another system where they could be organized and managed. All I’d have were text files that could be stored and edited anywhere on any device! I called this new system imdone, because once my notes were taken, I was done with recording the tasks on my kanban board and I’d soon be done with the task.

So if you don’t like wasting time and being buried by administrative BS, give imdone a try.