How to prepare tasks before starting work.
Most workdays are doomed to be unproductive, unpredictable, and to break all plans
when daily planning either doesn’t work properly or doesn’t exist at all.
Many people don’t plan their workday in advance and don’t track their processes.
This leads to the following:
- You work all day, but the task list doesn’t get any shorter
- Projects start consuming too much time and energy
- By the end of the day you’re exhausted, but don’t feel like you’ve done anything meaningful
- Anxiety and procrastination increase due to the lack of balance
The Overtime Tracker service is designed to help you stay in control of your work processes,
avoid overtime, and stay focused on what really matters.
Task list
In Overtime Tracker, work always starts with the task list.
There are no familiar project management structures here:
- No sprints
- No complex processes
- No long-term planning
This is intentional.
The idea is to focus strictly on today and go through the day as honestly as possible.
(Image placeholder)
The first thing we do before starting work is to create a list of all tasks.
We simply unload everything from our head without trying to structure it at this stage.
Once tasks are written down, they become visible and available for analysis and execution. This is a key point.
As long as a task stays in your head, it has no weight — it’s as if it doesn’t exist at all.
But once a task is on the list, you can evaluate it and understand its priority compared to others.
(Additional: how to create tasks — instructions)
Task estimation and ordering
Once the task list is created, we can move on to the next step — analysis and planning:
- Remove unnecessary tasks
- Estimate time
- Set priorities
Remove unnecessary tasks
We rarely keep structured task lists in our heads. That’s why when we dump our stream of thoughts into a task list,
it’s easy to add something unnecessary.
At this stage, we simply go through the list and remove what doesn’t belong there.
- Duplicate tasks
- Outdated tasks
- Things that don’t seem important today
(image showing how to delete tasks)
Estimate time
Once the task list is cleaned up, it’s time to estimate the tasks.
You don’t have to estimate everything at once. Very often tasks require deeper context,
and time limits can only be approximate.
Still, it’s worth doing, because without even rough boundaries we tend to get distracted and waste time.
(Time estimation instructions)
Set priorities
One of the key parts of preparing for a workday is deciding the execution order upfront.
If priorities aren’t defined early, they will be decided during work, which leads to distractions and wasted time.
In Overtime Tracker, task order is not a formality.
It’s the simplest possible way to define priorities — just like writing a to-do list in a notebook.
To change task priorities, you simply drag and drop them.
You can arrange tasks in any way that feels comfortable, but we recommend planning from top to bottom.
Top tasks are high priority, while tasks with lower value go to the bottom.
(GIF showing drag-and-drop)
Task List screen
At this point, task planning is complete.
The “Task List” screen is your working board.
Here you can clearly see:
- Which tasks are planned for today
- How many tasks remain until the end of the day
- How much time each task has taken
- How much planned time remains for each task
In short, the full current status of your workday.
Why there is no project planning
An approach where daily planning is separated from project planning
may feel unusual at first.
In practice, the more a person tries to plan, the more focus they lose.
That’s why Overtime Tracker is built around a single day.