How Taskpert is Helping you do One Thing at a Time

The science is in, multitasking is actually hurting us. It shows that our IQ’s are being lowered, our efficiency is being compromised and we lose our ability to memorize things.

At my day job, we’re building a distributed team for our agency business. There are lots of small tasks that need to happen by team members at different time zones.

Email is not cutting it — because we’re presented with an entire list of messages. We vainly try to reach inbox zero nirvana, but if you’re a knowledge worker, this fails most of the time. Moreover, tasks keep coming in and eventually messages that fall onto the next page get forgotten.

Slack does not work — Tasks that arrive from multiple team members still have to get done. There’s no good way to actually organize and deal with these.

We needed a way to get shit done one thing at a time.

I’ve seen a few stabs at this here and there, but we started working on Taskpert to solve this problem internally. Here’s what our first pass is looking like:

This is the only screen you see. There’s no task list. It’s the task that’s at the top of your queue. There are 3 possible actions you can take:

Delegate

This removes the task from your queue and sends it to someone else’s queue. They get a email notification that you delegated the task to them. You can delegate a task to anyone with an email.

Defer (Snooze)

This pushes the task back down into your queue for later. It uses intelligent defaults to check the size of your queue and just push it down a couple of places instead of the end of the queue. This is for tasks you just can’t do right now.

Done

You’ve completed the task. If someone delegated it to you it will be sent back to their queue with a notification that you’ve completed it. The task is no longer in your queue. It’s gone. The sender can delegate it back to you if something is wrong, or mark it as done so its removed from their queue and archived too.

Additionally, we’ve taking steps so you can attach instructions to each task. These How-to’s systematize your business process.

So now can build a library of instructions, create tasks, attach the instructions to them and delegate the tasks to anyone in the world.

Interested in getting early adopter access? Email me at eric@taskpert.com

Ericson Smith is CTO at Travel Agency Tribes and is building Taskpert in his spare time.