I’ve assemble a list of ”Must Haves” that any productivity system or app must have to keep you productive. If your system has these elements in place you will have a solid foundation for your productivity system.

If you want to stay productive you must have a productivity system with these elements.

I’ve tried a number of productivity systems in the past. I’ve narrowed the field by looking for certain key features which I’m going to list here for you. This way you don’t have to spend years like I did to find a system that will work out of the gate for you.

I’m not just talking about a to do list. What I’m talking about is a system that has many parts that work together in concert to make you be productive.

Here are the keys to look for in any system:

Projects: A project is simply something that requires more than one action to finish. All systems must have a project list. You want one view that can list all your projects.

• Area’s of responsibility: I like to break my project down into areas of responsibilities. Personal and work are 2 key areas for me. I find it helpful to know what my projects are at work and what my person projects are. You ant a system that can categorize your projects.

Next Actions: This is your to do list! To finish a project you may have 100 next actions. Every project should have a next action associated with it to move the project along.

• Contexts: A context is a way of breaking down the next actions. In this case you are assigning it to a location or maybe an action you need to take. For instance some next actions have to be done at work. So these are assigned a context of office. Some next actions are phone calls. I assign them to the call context. This is helpful so you can batch next actions even if they aren’t from the same project. Say you have a free moment between meetings you can filter the context call and make a few calls to keep your projects moving.
• Priority: I use this in conjunction with the today feature. Some tasks need to come up first. For me it’s really about the priority for the day. I find next actions have an ever changing priority.

• Due Dates: Some next actions require due dates. You want to be able to see next actions that have a hard due assigned to them.

Waiting For’s: One of the most powerful tools is the waiting for list. In fact I’ve written an entire post about it. Seeing what you have out there and what need t be followed up on is critical.

• Contacts: It’s great to be able to filter your waiting for’s by contact. Let’s say you have a meeting with John you can open up your list and see what you need to review with him.

Today: This is the list that I live in during the day. I do a daily check in with myself to see what should have my attention for the day. Once I’ve honed in on my priorities I create my today list with actions that need to be done today.

There are many apps out there that come very close to my ideal system. I’ve found most need a little tweaking and that’s important to understand. You need to understand much tweaking is really involved because you don’t want to have to waste time tweaking things as you are entering a task into your system. It’s needs to be fast, clean and simple.

Here’s my top recommendation:

• Nozbe  – If your goal is to be up and running fast with minimal effort, Nozbe will do everything listed above for you.

Here are a few other apps I’ve used with success with varying degrees of tweaking:

• Doit
• Nirvana
• Toodeldo
• IQTELL

What’s you app or system of choice? Tell me about on twitter.