Dev Diary: Our productivity secrets
At the moment we are a three (sometimes four) person team, but even with such a small number of people working together, things can get lost between the lines. How do we keep things organized? Here are some of our productivity secrets and tools of the trade.
Asana – We live on Asana. If it’s not on Asana, we probably won’t do it.
Chris and Jess scheduling lunch on Asana the other day.
Asana is a communal to do list. It’s how we keep track of the things we need to do, and the things we’ve already done. Big tasks don’t seem as intimidating when they’re split into chunks of subtasks, and there’s something incredibly satisfying about marking things as done.
Snippets – Sometimes things come up throughout the day that weren’t officially planned. These days can feel like a waste if there’s no record of what we did. So in addition to our to-do lists on Asana, we write down Snippets at the end of every day that record what we accomplished.
Chris’s Snippets are in an actual document, organized and detailing not only what he got done, but what he meant to get done. Yuliya’s is simpler, just a few notes on the Marketing Dashboard. Either way we can look back on a day and tweak what’s working and what isn’t.
No email – That’s right, that says NO email. Email is a distraction. As Chris once put it, email is a to-do list dictated by others. It’s way too easy to get caught up checking emails and getting distracted from what we actually needed to get done that day.
The whole team has discovered that our productivity increases if we put off checking email. Yuliya and Jess try not to check their emails until after they’ve completed their main tasks for the day. Chris is a bit more disciplined about it, checking only twice a day.
How do you stay productive? Tweet us @QuestForge or write down your answer on a piece of paper and keep it to yourself. Not like we’d know.
October 3, 2014 Friday at 12:56 pm
DestinyQuest 
