Productivity is full of methods and jargon. Here's a plain-English glossary of the terms you'll meet in guides, apps and team chats.
The process of capturing, organizing, prioritizing and tracking tasks from start to completion.
Planning and controlling how you spend your hours to work effectively on the right things.
Scheduling specific blocks of your calendar for specific tasks, instead of working from an open list.
Allotting a fixed, limited amount of time to a task to create focus and prevent overrun.
Working in focused 25-minute intervals separated by short breaks to sustain concentration.
A prioritization tool that sorts tasks by urgency and importance into four quadrants.
A prioritization method: Must have, Should have, Could have, Won't have (this time).
Labeling tasks A, B or C by importance and completing all A's before B's and C's.
Getting Things Done — David Allen's method: capture, clarify, organize, reflect, engage.
A visual workflow where tasks move across columns (To do, Doing, Done), often with WIP limits.
Work-in-progress limit — a cap on how many tasks are in progress at once, to improve flow.
Focused, distraction-free work on cognitively demanding tasks; a term coined by Cal Newport.
Doing your hardest or most important task first thing in the day.
If a task takes under two minutes, do it immediately instead of tracking it.
Listing your six most important tasks for tomorrow in priority order and working them top-down.
Planning one big, three medium and five small tasks per day for a balanced workload.
Grouping similar tasks and doing them together to reduce context-switching costs.
The mental cost of jumping between different tasks, which reduces focus and speed.
The very next physical, concrete step needed to move a task or project forward.
A prioritized list of tasks or work items waiting to be done.
The date or time by which a task must be completed.
The relative importance of a task, used to decide what to work on first.
Delaying a task despite knowing the delay will make things worse; usually an emotional avoidance.
A regular session to update your task list, reschedule, and plan the week ahead.
A written list of tasks to be completed, the simplest task management tool.
An analog task and note system using rapid logging and simple symbols in a notebook.