How to track what you are waiting on from other people

Some of your most important tasks are not yours to do. The signed contract, the reply from finance, the review a colleague promised by Wednesday: each one blocks something you need, and each one is easy to forget because there is nothing for you to do until it arrives.

David Allen’s Getting Things Done calls this the “waiting for” list. It is one of the most useful parts of the method and one of the least practised.

Capture it at the moment of hand-off

The moment you send a request, ask a question, or delegate a task, write one line:

waiting: Laura - signed SOW, asked 6 Oct, chase thu #waiting
waiting: IT - laptop for new starter, ticket 4471, chase mon #waiting

Four things matter: who, what, when you asked, and when you will chase. The chase date is the part people skip and the part that does the work.

If you capture tasks with a global hotkey, this takes seconds straight after you send the email. In Jot, a line with “chase thu” in it becomes a reminder on Thursday, so the waiting list reminds you instead of the other way round. The date parsing is described in natural language dates in task apps.

Review it with your other lists

A waiting list is only useful if you look at it. Two moments work well:

• Daily, glance at anything with a chase date today.
• Weekly, during your review, look at everything and update the chase dates.

When something arrives, tick it off. When something has been waiting far too long, decide whether to chase, escalate or drop it.

Chase politely and specifically

When a chase date arrives, a short, specific message is the most effective:

Hi Laura, checking in on the signed SOW from last Monday. We need it by Friday to keep the 1 November start. Is anything blocking it?

It restates what you need, why the date matters, and invites the real reason it is late. A vague “just following up” is easier to ignore.

Do not use your inbox as a waiting list

Keeping sent emails flagged, or leaving messages unread as reminders, works until the inbox grows. Then the waiting items are hidden among everything else. A separate list with chase dates is easier to scan. The same problem applies to using email for your own tasks, discussed in how to stop using your inbox as a todo list.

Close the loop when it arrives

When the thing you were waiting for arrives, tick the waiting item and, if it unblocks your own work, capture that next step right away. The hand-back is where momentum is lost most often.

Jot is on the Microsoft Store.

Jot is a quick-capture app for Windows: one hotkey, one line, back to what you were doing. What it is, or what is still unproven.