The Tag-It Approach To Productivity Gives You More Categories And Control Over Tasks

One of the nice things about productivity techniques like GTD is that they help you organise tasks based on how actionable, important or quick to finish a given task is. The Tag-It Approach gives you more categories in which to drop your tasks, if you feel like you need more control over how they’re organised.

Photo by David Chico Pham.

Most productivity techniques tell you to put your tasks into three major categories: things you can do immediately, things you have to follow up on later and take time, and things that don’t require a response but need you to read or review them. The Tag-It Approach gives you five categories: tasks that are urgent and important, tasks with big benefits to completion, tasks where there will be big problems if you delay, tasks from people who’ll nag you the longer you wait, and tasks that don’t fit and are arranged by time to complete.

You can tweak the categories to meet your needs, but the goal is to separate out the things that are urgent and important from the things that aren’t important but have consequences if you wait, for example. Some of the technique is built on the “Four Quadrant” matrix of urgency and importance, from Stephen Covey’s book First Things First.

As we noted in our guide to mashing up your own custom productivity technique, this is just one of many techniques you can use to build a method that works for you, but if you find the categories of other techniques restrictive, this approach is worth a look.

Try the Tag-It Approach For Increased Daily Productivity [Dumb Little Man]


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