🔱 👆🏽 🍼 Automation of a journalist. Part 1: Tasks and Calendars 🧞 ✊ 🤳🏼

For over 15 years I have been working as a technical journalist. I help to talk about products, technologies and, what can I hide here, I integrate into the hunting strategy.

There is a demand for me, so for many years the task for me has been improving my work efficiency. As they say, there are so many interesting tasks around, and I am alone ...

I’m not at the “extreme frontier” in terms of technology. But if some popular automation tool appears on the market, sooner or later they tell me about it whether I want it or not. Therefore, over the years of work, I tried dozens of different “things that make life easier”. But in the end, only a few really came into use. I want to talk about them.

(and this is my husband painted on a T-shirt;)

In a nutshell, it’s impossible to talk about a whole field of activity, so we will dive in stages. I’ll immediately make a remark: this is not a review of services (almost any can be replaced by an analog), but only a story about my personal approach. Moreover, I will talk “in my own words”, ignoring all the editorial policies required for work and simplifying the process of text production.

Part 1. Tasks and calendars

The work of a technical journalist is not only endless conversations and writing articles, but also a huge layer of routine. Once it all started with one-time orders for review articles on open sources. Now my work is a constantly moving colossus, where you cannot miss the deadlines for requesting comments, approving quotes, sending for proofreading, where there are obligations for regular publications, etc.

The only way to curb the chaos that is happening in real life is organization and classification.

I have three types of tasks

The first is events that are strictly tied to time - interviews, meetings, meetings. They can be transferred, but not individually, but only after discussion with the participants.

Such tasks are more convenient to create on the calendar. Most of my business partners use Google Calendar, and so do I. At one time I tried all sorts of Outlook, but tying to one workplace or dancing with a tambourine to synchronize with portable versions was a big obstacle.

The second type is large-scale tasks, where you need to have a large amount of time left to carry out. The task must first be loaded into the brain, and then generate the result. Example: creating the text of an article based on previously collected information. This is difficult to do with small approaches.

The third is the whole routine that surrounds the first two tasks. Eight calls regarding the arrangement of the interview time, five reminders to the speaker about the approval of quotations, approval of deadlines and thematic plans, writing questions and preliminary discussion with the customer of the text, requesting photos of speakers to ready-made articles, if required by the editors, etc. This also includes the not so long ago emerged class of tasks for formalizing the activities of individual entrepreneurs (contracts, acts, accounts, payment of taxes). Along with this, there are family matters - children's logistics, home supply: products, consumables and much more.

For the first type of tasks you need a calendar, for the rest - it is contraindicated (purely my opinion). Tasks of the second and third type cannot be mixed in one list, because this gives a misconception about the total time available for work, but it would be better to “substitute” the first tasks into the list with the second. Family affairs are generally better kept separate from work ... And how to implement this?

10 years ago, without even having such a clear classification in my head, I thought about efficiency and started with an Excel tablet, tasks in Thunderbird and attempts to tune monstrous Outlook for myself. But in 2011, I made an important decision to leave 100% remote. At first, I was not able to take tasks 100% of the working time and used it for a comprehensive study and setup of the work process. It included time tracking, read books on personal effectiveness and case management, tested various recommended tools. Free time quickly ended - tasks for money appeared - but the habit of RTM (Remember the milk), then still in conjunction with Evernote notebooks, came out of all this activity. At one time I even had a paid account for both ...

In 2015, together with the decline in their own work due to the birth of their first child, they had to reconsider the feasibility of using paid accounts of foreign services - it is understandable why. From that moment, the volumes overtook and surpassed previous indicators. But now the same thing, only better, is available for free.

How it all looks now. RTM

The center of everything is RTM, with a web version. I use it as my personal “chaos control center”. Despite the fact that mobility is important to me (a working computer - a laptop / tablet - a smartphone for quickly “plugging holes” on the road), the application on the smartphone did not work for me. At first their model interfered with synchronization once a day on a free account, then on a paid model it simply “didn’t”. I still use the application only in emergency cases when I need to record a business, being far from any of the workplaces.

I use lists (by customer), tags (by occupation), smart lists:

all relevant work tasks (that is, all except the “someday” list),
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A year ago, I singled out tasks on the road (regardless of the customer and the nature of the activity). She lived on the outskirts, to get out of the area, it took time. I tried to plan all field affairs for a week in one day. Due to this, a non-acidic optimization of time was obtained. But with the move to the center, this “Feng Shui” lost its meaning - part of the affairs can now generally be done in 10-minute access by electric scooter.

By the way, I also sorted things in lists by place of execution before, but it turned out that this affects somewhere in 5% of the records, so the overall effect is close to zero. I also singled out cases related to payment (when documents are agreed or money is expected). Sometimes a young family needed money urgently - I wanted to understand what my actions could speed up something. This practice comes and goes, depending on the ratio of income to expenses.

To highlight small tasks from large ones, as well as calls and trips from everything else, I use additional notes in the task header.

“0 -“ I note short things that you can do during breaks (quickly check, send, remind by mail),
“CALL:” and “EXIT:” are used, respectively, for phone calls and cases outside the home.

The same could be implemented with tags, but my approach makes it easy to influence the details of sorting by deadline and does not require a monthly subscription fee.

I hardly use RTM's built-in priorities - I miss their four grades. In fact, I use 2 priorities - the highest and none - adding my logic:

Short tasks of the highest priority automatically get to the top of the list (as I wrote above, they have an index “0-”).
I set the long tasks of the highest priority in the morning of the working day in the queue manually, setting the names “1-”, “2-”, etc. first. Sometimes this rating is maintained for 2-3 days unchanged.
Tasks without priority are at the end of the list.

Such a scheme is convenient, since I have large-scale tasks of the second type (2 - 5 hours), i.e. all this does not have to be redone several times a day.

In the notes for the task in RTM, I usually store links to the necessary documents: a file with the interview, decryption text, letters on the task in the mail. Previously, all this fell into Evernote notes, which were tied to tasks. But practice has shown that it is easier not to invent an additional service for storing texts and hyperlinks for current projects. Archive is another matter, but I’ll tell about it another time.

Calendar view

RTM has one important drawback - there is no calendar view. Tasks can be sorted by time, etc., but here’s the classic “Month”, as in Google Calendar, you can’t see here. Therefore, the already mentioned Google Calendar is used to record information about interviews and meetings. An additional incentive in the direction of this tool is the fact that several of my customers also use it. Conveniently share scheduled appointments via mail.

A big issue until recently was the curved synchronization of RTM and Google Calendar. By default, they were ready to send back and forth complete to-do lists. And recently, Google generally ceased to support any function through which this synchronization was implemented in the free version. I need to keep records of planned interviews from the Calendar in RTM (and only in this direction). It turned out that this can be done through IFTTT. When creating or changing a case on the calendar, the service sends me an email to the RTM account, thus adding a task with certain parameters. So when planning a week, I see in the calendar view (Month) what is fixed on what day. And every morning, opening RTM, I get at the top of the list information about things planned for a certain time.

Integration where tasks are lost

IFTTT is also used for collecting tasks from different accounts. I have customers who use Trello and Asana. When a task is assigned to me there, information about it through IFTTT falls into my single to-do list. I respond to the customer on the project in his system, but I can carry out my own planning in one window. This is very valuable.

Similarly, I have built adding tasks via telegram bot.

At the time of a sharp increase in the load after the decree, I noticed that I could easily lose the task when I receive a lot of different calls on different channels. But this loss occurs only at the time of switching between applications. Those. they wrote to me, for example, in the Cart, that the text should be corrected. I’m more likely to forget about it if I get into the RTM mobile application to add a task, and at that moment someone will call. After the call, I see the RTM interface, but I don’t remember why it was needed ...

The way out is to fix the fact of the task itself before you even leave the application. So my tasks are added through the telegram bot (from IFTTT) and through Gmail (the option “Add to Tasks” and the integration of Tasks with RTM via Zapier) - in my case, these are the two main channels for receiving tasks.

Trello for family tasks

Describing the third type of tasks, I mentioned family matters. In order not to confuse them with everything else, I chose a fundamentally different service - Trello. For two with my husband, we have a board where all things related to repairs, kindergartens, home logistics, etc. are dumped. There is specifically no automation. From the “home” board in RTM or Calendar tasks get only in emergency cases. And only by hand.

That's all for today. Next time I’ll talk about working with speakers. In this part, not everything is so straightforward, therefore, it will be discussed not only about what I already use, but also about how this type of activity basically looks and why it is not possible to use existing tools for it. Maybe the collective mind will tell me something here?