I won’t ever forget anything at work ever again.

It all comes down to adhering to a rather involved procedure to keep my work tasks organized, people connected, and to leave a cookie trail behind me so that if I have to ever refer to what happened in the past, there is an easy way to get at it.

At work I use the Mail.app on Mac OSX Snow Leopard, on my work iMac. Technically since I use IMAP the application itself is irrelevant, but this is where I do most of my work tasks day-to-day. WMU provides a web-based interface called Webmail Plus, but I really prefer to not use that. I get more mileage out of Mail.app.

Everyone has learned that the best way to alert me and my staff to things that they need is by email. Email creates a kind of digital documentation, a little slip of virtual paper that people write up and tack to our door. It doesn’t get lost and serves as a reminder of things we have to do, with details that we need to complete the tasks. It’s really the best way to go since email is so ubiquitous.

I get tasks in Mail.app whenever I run the app or bring it to the foreground. Because it’s IMAP whatever I change in the account is reflected everywhere else I have a connection to that account, like a window. So my iPhone, my iPad, my MacBook, my home Mac Mini, or my work iMac always has the right list of emails in my Webmail Plus Inbox.

When I get a new task in Mail.app I use the key combination Command-Shift-E, which in Mail.app redirects the incoming email so I can send it somewhere else. It’s better than forward, it resends the message as if it was originally sent to where I want it to go. I redirect all my tasks to my Toodledo account’s email address. Right before I send the redirected message, I tack on to the subject of the task a little bit of text “@work #today” which informs Toodledo to make a new task for me, set it in my Work Context, set the due date for Today (or really whatever day I want) and then hit send. Doing this keeps my Webmail Plus Inbox blissfully empty. I get tasks and punt them forward to my Toodledo to track them and organize them.

Once the task is in my Toodledo list, I configure the list to show me Work tasks, organized by due-date and then by priority. I don’t really enrich the tasks with priority data so the principal sort is actually alphanumeric beyond the due-date sort. It’s in Toodledo that I spend a majority of my time. Toodledo captures everything, the text, any attachment files, you name it. This way I am sure I am not missing any tasks. I may be late with a task or two, but none should fall off the edge. As I work tasks I complete whatever it is the task requires and then I copy the body of the task, which is the body of the redirected email into a new email and then tack on some pleasantries like “Task complete” or some-such and on the CC line I include the email address for my department WordPress.com blog, and right above the signature line on my outgoing email to the task requestor I include a WordPress [tags] and [end] blocks to keep the usually messy signatures from clogging up my blog and setting all the tags so that when people ask me about a certain thing I can browse the tag-cloud on the WordPress blog and find the task, the time and the date it was completed. I don’t have to muck about with Sent Items or any of that malarkey. As an added extra, WordPress automatically creates pages for tags and sets up RSS feeds for tags so interested parties can just browse to the tags they are most interested in to see what is going on. Most people aren’t interested and the WordPress blog ends up mostly being for me. I quite enjoy it, I no longer have to spend time trying to remember when I did whatever I do and so I can sort of mindlessly chug through tasks without having to waste any precious brainpower on any of it. WordPress, Toodledo, and Mail.app do all the heavy lifting and storage for me, all delightfully complimentary.

In the morning I adjust a search on Toodledo to find all the tasks in Toodledo that I have completed the day before and then I use Toodledo and Byword to quickly markdown the tasks as a numbered list and then ship that off using MarsEdit off to the blog. The overall goal is to free myself as much as possible from the headache-inducing parts of my job as I can manage. Did I do something? When did I do it? Was there some kind of trick in fixing something or other? It’s all in the blog. In many ways I have replaced the need to form new memories about my work off to WordPress, so I really don’t know in a day-to-day way exactly what I have done here. I don’t want to know it. WordPress knows it for me. The only thing I bring to the table are my skills and abilities. Everything else has been farmed out elsewhere.

There is something very secure about such a way of managing my life. I can’t answer any questions posed to me about my job. I don’t form any long-term memories about this place. I’ve gotten used to the relaxed almost meditative way that I chew through my days. Technology keeps the things I find irritable or troubling. In many ways, doing it this way has vouchsafed the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. My spotless mind.