Have you ever gone to the grocery store without knowing what you need to buy? You just walk down each aisle evaluating everything, seeing what's on sale or what's reachable. If you have, then you know what happens. You end up wasting a bunch of time and even more money because you have no plan. Worse, you get home and realize you forgot something you actually needed.
Running your Solopreneur business without a task list can feel the same way. When everything falls on you, it's easy for important work to fall through the cracks. And without a plan, you end up doing something that feels productive instead of something that's actually productive. Anyone who has used AI to build a thing they didn't need to build knows what I'm talking about. I'm sorry if you feel called out or personally attacked by that. I fell into that trap recently. The thing is though, if you don't have a good way to capture your tasks, you're never going to get the whole picture. Which is why you need an easy way to capture your tasks.
Hey, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Streamline Solopreneur, the show that helps you build reliable systems so you can take time off worry-free. I'm your host, Joe Casabona.
And here's the problem. You can't know what you're going to work on if you don't know what you need to work on. And lots of people have told me, well, I'll remember the important things, or if they're that important, they'll come back around. But the truth is, this is how things fall through the cracks. And yes, maybe we do have a task manager, or we keep our tasks in Notion or Todoist, but if we don't have a system for capturing everything and then reviewing everything, we can't possibly create a plan for how we're going to attack the week.
And what that means is that we remember the big picture stuff, but our day can easily be interrupted by someone emailing us and asking us to do something real quick, or us trying out a new tool because it feels productive, or just us getting distracted and watching YouTube, and then realizing where the day went.
So, today I'm going to give you three ways to quickly capture tasks in a way that is increasingly more automated. But the idea here is you want to make it as easy as possible to capture tasks.
And that's really the first thing. Capture your tasks quickly. Make it as easy as possible. Easy as possible could be a voice note, it could be a keyboard shortcut, it could be a button on your lock screen. I have easy ways to capture tasks on all of my devices, including my watch. And yes, dictation has been a huge game-changer here. I use Todoist Ramble regularly. I use Whisper memos to capture ideas regularly, and then I process those ideas with other features in Todoist.
The idea is that while the actual act of taking something out of your brain and putting it into an app isn't automated or automatable, you're capturing something while you're thinking about it instead of trying to remember it later. Because there is nothing more frustrating than going I'll remember that and then an hour later going, " What the hell was I trying to remember”? So you want to capture things as quickly as possible.
Most of my random tasks go into the Todoist inbox so that when I do my weekly planning session on Sunday, I can sort them into projects, due dates, and whatever else I need to do to make sure that I do those tasks when they need to be done and not when I next remember them.
But quick capture is one way, and there are more sophisticated ways to capture tasks and sort them automatically. And that's really number two. Speech to Text to Sort For a long time, I was using a Zapier automation in conjunction with Whisper Memos.
At the end of the day I would do some stream of consciousness rambling about everything I had to do or didn't get to that task. That text would then get sent to ChatGPT via Zapier and parsed. The tasks would get separated out and sent to Todoist. That whole flow was replaced by Todoist's Ramble feature. And I should say at this point, full disclosure, Todoist is a former sponsor of my content, not necessarily this podcast, but I have partnered with them in the past.
Now, the Todoist Ramble feature is faster, it's smarter, it does not require any other tools. My fewest links philosophy in a nutshell, right? Instead of going from app A to Zapier to a large language model to app B, it just all goes in app A. But the biggest win here is that because Todoist Ramble is an app-level feature, it adds projects and labels based on context. So I don't need to sort them because this is what would happen. I would word vomit everything. I was thinking it would send it to ChatGPT, ChatGPT would send it back to Todoist, and it would just all go in my inbox for me to sort later because there was no context, and I didn't feel like writing this complex prompt to give it context and understand everything that was in Todoist might not have even been possible in a time before mcp. So now I don't need to sort. Todoist just knows pretty much exactly where to put things.
And they're currently testing a text and image version of Ramble as well. Right now it's on the desktop as I record this. By the time this comes out, it might be different, but on my Mac, I've been able to just drop emails into it and get a task list which has been super helpful for long emails from my kids schools or client emails.
Ramble is easily my favorite software feature of the year so far. Like bar none, just such a fantastic feature. But this still isn't fully automated, which is why I've been experimenting with this third way: Automate Task Capture with AI agents.
Now, I should be upfront here and mention that I don't love the term agents in reference to large language models. They are not working autonomously. They are slightly more advanced versions of automation in my opinion. So it's just like a little better, more contextual automation. But I use the term AI agents because that is what everybody will know. That is the shared language and context we all know.
But branding aside, tools like Zapier's Agent or Claude Cowork are automation tools that present the perfect opportunity to take us out of the equation completely by performing a scheduled task every day at the same time, looking for emails in specific places. I have one that will look in my inbox and under the Gmail label Actionable. I've made a label called Actionable. It will pull those tasks out of the emails, and then it will add them to Todoist. But it could be a text file, it could be a dashboard, it could just be a summary email so that you don't have to read through a bunch. But this is a fully automated way at least to get tasks out of your email inbox.
Todoist also has MCP integration, which means that my cloud skill can put things directly into the app for me. And while in earlier iterations I was having trouble with the MCP, uh, it's been pretty good the last few days, knock on wood, as I record this.
This has been a huge help to me because I treat my inbox as my to-do list sometimes. But this doesn't just have to be emails. It could also be called summaries and transcripts from your call recorder, podcast, or YouTube video transcripts that you save long form notes or project documents. Really, anything you can think of.
I'm using a separate Obsidian vault from my primary vault, and I call it AI Memory. Anything I want Claude to access goes in there, and then I can run scheduled tasks on those folders and files as well. So when I do have call summaries, I send them to the AI Memory Obsidian vault, and there's another scheduled task that runs sometime in the evening that will look through all of those and create a summary document. Again, these are calls I had that I already have my own notes for. So this is just kind of like a reminder, and then it pulls out tasks, and it will put them in Todoist for me. And this is fine because I can process my tasks in Todoist. I have a custom view called Recently Created Tasks, and it's way easier than any method I've done before.
So those are the three ways:
Make capture as easy as possible
Use speech-to-text
Automate task capture with AI agents.
The whole point of this is you want to get the full picture. Idea capture has always been an important part of my system. My family and friends have often praised me for my exceptional memory, and I do have a good memory. But part of the reason I have a good memory is because I've gotten into the habit of moving stuff out of my brain and into something more tangible and less susceptible to change. I often hear, if it's important enough, I will remember it. That is patently untrue, but in the age of large language models, it's also completely unnecessary. Capturing all of your notes, emails, and tasks allows you to get a full picture of your work life and your business so that you can spend your time effectively. This beats doing work just for the sake of working, which is a waste of time, money, and resources. It's like going to the grocery store without knowing what you need.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Streamlined Solopreneur. If you want to get your tasks in order, if you're trying to figure out how you work and what you should work on, I have a free resource for you over at streamlined.fm/asks. You'll find a link to that in the show notes. If you liked this episode or you know somebody who needs to hear it, because they said if it's important enough, I'll remember it. Share it with a friend, but definitely check out that free resource over at streamlined.fm/tasks.
Thanks so much for listening, and until next time. I hope you find some space in your week.