These tasks are rarely complex, but they’re easy to forget or assume "someone did it".
How do you assign and track recurring work in a small team?
Do you: - use task managers? - calendars? - informal routines? - just trust it gets done?
What actually works long-term?
From my point of view the power of automation for recurring tasks is less to do with time saved, and more to do with making sure that it will get done and be done the same way every time.
Bonus tip: log the outputs of automated tasks when they run, but only send out notifications of errors - that way you don't train staff to ignore the notifications from the task just because they see it every time the job runs, and instead seeing a notification from it is rare, so they know they need to investigate.
What I keep running into is the gray area between "can’t be automated yet" and "shouldn’t be automated". Things like reviews, checks, approvals, or manual verifications.
The notification fatigue point is especially real. If everything notifies, nothing gets attention.
Do you usually treat non-automatable tasks as exceptions, or do you still rely on routines / trust for those?
Walking the board feels a bit awkward and slow at first, but after a few weeks you find that it takes very little time. It certainly works well for us.
I’ve mostly been thinking about lower visibility recurring tasks that don’t always make it onto a board.
If it’s time to do the task but it’s so big that I cannot do it directly I will create a Jira ticket for it.
When the task is done I either remove it from the list, or bump the due date if it’s a recurring task.
The cases I’ve been thinking about are team-level recurring tasks, where execution and ownership need to be visible beyond a single person.
Any good (agile) collaboration system supports this. We did this succesfully in Azure DevOps and GitLab, for example.
Did it still feel lightweight enough for very small, administrative routine tasks?
The ops team then could assign the task to themselves whenever they were ready to execute. And as a manager it made tracking and follow up a lot easier.
1) Slack Workflow - used to remind us for recurring but not "have to do right away" tasks. Each of us adds a reaction when they complete the task 2) Recurring calendar invite - for important "must do" tasks where we invite the whole team. The 'owner' will accept the meeting
Being a small team means we each look out of each other, so we kindly remind each other when things could slip through the cracks.
A simple email reminder will suffice for most things. Assuming you have good employees, they just need gently prodding. :)
The only thing I’ve seen missing sometimes is an explicit acknowledgement, so later you don’t have to rely on memory.
Additionally, we use long and detailed commits that act as “howTos” when manual actions is required - we just link to the commit SHA1 even though we have notion. Git docs are evolving more naturally alongside the code. Now ofc with AI fairly high quality docs can be generated and updated automatically.
Keeping docs close to the code has worked well in my experience too.
codingdave•1mo ago
batels•1mo ago
Where I’ve personally seen friction is with recurring, low-visibility work.
Things people fully intend to do, but that don’t produce immediate feedback.