I’m a huge fan of Asana for task management as I’ve mentioned before. Their web app is amazing, but despite a much improved recent upgrade, I still find their mobile app a bit too slow. I don’t like to do much task management on my phone, but I try to strictly follow the Getting Things Done (GTD) axiom that new To Dos should move as quickly as possible from your head to some sort of repository. Specifically, when I think of a new task, I want it on paper somewhere as fast as possible. The Asana mobile app still takes way to long too load and create a new task.

Captio is an ultra-simple and very fast note-taking app that opens extremely quickly and sits on my phone’s home screen. Other than storing simple text notes, its one and only feature is that it will email each note to a specified address. Zapier is an awesome service for mashing up APIs. Much like IFTTT, Zapier let’s you build recipes where an action in one program triggers another action in a different program. E.g. -

When I post to Tumblr, tweet the link. When I add a Mailchimp subscriber, add them to my Highrise CRM, etc.

So I created a simple mashup. One of Zapier’s triggers is a custom email address. I set my Captio email address to my @in.zapier.com address, connected my Asana Workspace and set it to create a new task assigned to me with the email’s content as the task.

The whole process takes about 5 minutes and you shave 10 seconds off each time (for me about 30x a day) you need to get a To Do into your Asana. Very GTD.

Update: I now use the Squarespace Note app instead of Captio. It’s equally fast and simple, but allows Evernote sync in case I think the note should go there instead. Setup is the same by setting your Zapier inbox as the email option.

Anybody else got cool productivity hacks to share?