Keeping track of all you have to do in academia Back when I was in graduate school and as a post-doc, life was fairly blissful. Only one big responsibility: research. Now as a faculty member I find so many things to do. Teach, supervise undergrads and grads, publish papers, perform research, participate in service/administrative activities, get funding, etc. Plus throw in family life, friends, etc.

I've looked at all sorts of productivity systems over the years (GTD, 7 Habits, etc.), and have settled on a simple todo list method, where I have a master list of tasks in a todo list  that I periodically review. The problem is the list just seems to get bigger and bigger. More gets on  the list than comes off, especially during busy seasons, like when teaching or when grants are due. 

I realize that busy is part of the game, but how do you keep track of everything and not go crazy?
Another nice todo list system is Trello which lets you do things like add mini-check lists to items, make separate lists for each thing, add notes to items, add pictures to items, and add other people to items.  The ability to add sub-items helps a lot in that it makes it feel like I'm getting somewhere on large projects that take a lot of time and hang around in my to-do list for weeks.

Trello is also really nice for sharing/collaborating/delegating work.  In our lab, we have a Trello board for any projects where multiple people are collaborating so everyone is able to keep track of who's responsible for what.

Last, it lets you move your items around so that you can prioritize them.  Stuff that you need to get done sooner goes on the top while less critical stuff is on the bottom.  I also have a bit of a garbage cleaning policy where if it's been sitting in the low priority for a while and I still haven't gotten around to it, it goes into a theoretical "someday when I have free time" list.