Strictly scheduled stuff goes into calendar, but otherwise I have two text files. The first one I prepare every Monday, listing important things for each day of the week. The other one I do every morning, listing the most important tasks for the day, and a few “nice to have if there’s time”. That’s about it.

For very short-term things, i.e. today or tomorrow, a sticky note on my desktop that goes into recycling the moment it is done. For medium term things, a checklist manager like Google Keep. For longer term or complex things, then project management software like Jira. As another commenter suggested, treat these like a scrum.

For request that I or my team perform for others, it goes into a ticketing system 100%.

Jira.

to-do.txt

Write them down, then forget about them till the annualish purge of accumulated notes and flags

For task tracking, I setup and used:

Request Tracker(RT)

It is meant to be the customer facing catch-all for a large entity like a helpdesk. Can automatically convert emails into tasks.

Depends on whether the team I am in uses Scrum or not.

If the team uses Scrum, everything is on the backlog, so rarely do I need personal lists.

If the team doesn’t use Scrum, then I set up my own personal Scrum board. That way, I can deal better with people coming in and saying “hey, snek_boi, this task that I just thought of is urgent and I need you to drop everything you’re doing and do this now”. With the Scrum board, I can then ask them if what they need me to do is more important than whatever’s on top of my personal backlog, and often they themselves realize their ‘urgent’ task is actually not that urgent.

Since you asked about software, I’ve used Taiga and Notion.

Also, I used to do GTD religiously, but now I mainly use Scrum because it forces me to ruthlessly prioritize. Since you asked about apps, I’ll tell you that when I did GTD, I used Joplin with Syncthing (or some combination of Syncthing and a local notes app). I switched to StandardNotes before stopping doing GTD altogether. Maybe I’ll come back to GTD in the future.

I also almost started Bullet Journaling, buying the journal and all, but a friend of mine was quite depressed and seemed to need it more so I gave it all to him.

Ticket system.
Not there, (usually) not my task.
Except for my superior and I’ll usually try to make him to create a ticket.

Org Mode.

I’m generally a vim user, but for job-related task management I set up emacs with evil (too many) years ago. There were vim plugins to reimplement pieces of it, but none of them covered all the functions I would use (that may have changed in the last decade, but I have a working system so it wasn’t worth the effort to check). I add tasks, tag priorities, and set recurrences for maintenance tasks. For billable or potentially billable tasks I use the built in clocking.

I make relevant notes under the tasks as I work on them, keep the finished task until weekly manager meetings, then archive them so they don’t clutter my working file but remain searchable if ever needed (which is more often than you might think).

I add new tasks at the top. Unfinished lower priority tasks get pushed down out of sight over time. When we hit a slow period, I review them and archive anything no longer relevant, then reprioritize and start working through the backlog.

If there is no ticket there is no task. That is company policy and anyone trying to skirt it gets a discussion with their manager.

As much as I hate Service Now it does a good job of tracking everything assigned to your name.

My job is pretty chill, so I only have a todo.txt on my desktop

Logseq. All my notes and tasks go in there, they link out to other systems if needed.

I started writing all of my todo items on my Friday calendar. If i put them on Monday, Tuesday, etc., they just get left in the dust at the end of the day. Now i know to check Friday whenever i have spare time. Whatever doesn’t get done gets moved to next Friday.

Personal to-do lists, a two-tier todo.txt process.

I have One Big Todo list, into which everything goes, with (at the least) added date and priority. At any job, this list becomes unmanageable and overwhelming within a couple of months, so I use the Executive List process a the second tier. It’s the critical part that makes the rest work.

I create a new executive list every morning; it’s a list of things from my main list that I think I could accomplish that day. It is always larger than I have time for: the important thing about “could do today” is that it’s things that I’m able to complete - I have everything I need to do - not whether I necessarily have time. But the list is reasonable; it’s not hugely more stuff than I can accomplish, it’s just that I know I won’t complete everything. As I check things off, they’re also checked off the big list. New things only go in the big list first, although they might also get added to the executive list.

The EL is psychological:

• It’s manageable. It’s not a overwhelming, like the Big List of Everything I Need to Do is. It’s easier to face.
• I know I won’t complete everything, because I’ve intentionally overloaded it so that I can’t. This removes the stress to “do everything” on the list.
• It is trashed at the end of the day, and the first thing I do the next day is create a new list from scratch. This further removes stress about the importance of the list.

The big list only ever gets bigger. Once a month, quarter, or year I go through the big list and delete (well, archive) everything that’s OBE. But the nature of management is that there’s always more than you can do, and much of it isn’t really important, but you can’t determine this in the moment. This is like going into Jira and deleting tickets over two years old, or whatever similar progress your team uses.

The EL lets you prioritize accomplishable tasks for the day; it’s ephemeral, and surmountable. It’s also a way to break down bigger tasks from the Big List into bite-size chunks; the BL may have “resolve issue requiring scheduled server reboots”, and you might put “talk to OPs about sending nightly logs to dev team” on the EL.

I used to just fill journals with pages and pages of to-do lists. It was worse than useless. Even moving it to todo.txt was a partial solution, because while it was easier to query, the list still became overwhelming. I dreaded looking all that list. The EL changed all that. I start the day looking at the BL, poking at it, pulling some things out into the EL for the day, maybe deleting some OBE items, but it’s low key. Once I get a half dozen or dozen things in the EL, I stop, and start working on those items.

Throw it away at the end of the day, though - completed or not. If you’re completing everything, add more stuff tomorrow; you should always have something to throw away, to reinforce that you’re not trying to do everything. Don’t carry the EL forward, or it just becomes another BL.

Some scripts really help, here. Copying things from BL to EL; completing things in the BL that were completed in the EL. It’s not necessary, but it makes things easier. This is why I use todo.txt - it’s plain text, and easily manipulatable with standard Unix text processing tools, and so easy to script.

Planner for long term projects.
Emails stay unread till dealt with in Outlook, same with Teams.
Calendar events for day and time specific things/meetings.
Sticky notes for day to day tasks so I can cross them off. Going all digital just sucks. I like crossing things physically off a list.
Reminders on my personal device for really big DO NOT FORGET to dos. Those are rare.