Are you a to-do list junkie? Do you have sticky notes plastered across your computer monitor? Like many of us in this immediate response world, you may need a way to track all the tasks that are waiting for your input. Think of the My Tasks stack option in the Engagement Console just like your social media response to-do list. We recently made some changes to the functionality of this stack, so let’s cover off on the basics of setting up a My Task stack, what type of posts you’ll find within such a stack, and then we’ll move into some best practices around using it.

How do I build my To-do List Stack?
A My Tasks Stack has it’s own icon a the top of the Engagement Console that you will need to click to open up a new My Tasks Stack.

When you open up a new stack, this is what you’ll see. Let’s walk through what the options mean.

Stack Topics (Optional)
You do not need to select a topic profile here, but you can if you wish to limit the view of posts to one specific topic profile or multiple topic profiles.

Real Time Monitoring (Refresh Rate)
This will be how often the stack refreshes to show any new posts that have been assigned to you.

Media Types
Just like with any stack you can limit the posts you see by Media Type.

Sort By
Choose whether you’d like to see the oldest posts assigned to you or newest posts assigned to you first.

Filter By
All Content: Shows all posts
Post Tag/Queue: Shows post with a specified post tag
Source Tag: Shows post with a specified source tag

Highlight Keywords
If you want to search the posts assigned to you for specific keywords, enter them here.

Posts per Page
Decide how many posts show in your stack.

**Tip: You may notice that there used to be many more Filter By options and this used to be where you had to select “My Tasks”, we’ve recently made updates to this Stack to give users more functionality. The stack will now always pull posts assigned to you, no need to select that Filter option.

How do I build this in one step?
If you prefer to have a Default view of your My Tasks stack, (this will pull every post assigned to you across all topic profiles & media types) visit the Radian6 tab of your Preferences dialog box (File –>Preferences) to select the “Automatically launch My Tasks stack with Default configuration. With this box selected whenever you select the My Tasks stack button , the stack will automatically be created for you.

What should I be seeing in this stack?
As the name suggests, a My Tasks stack will only show you the items that are assigned to you. Whatever user you login as will also be the user that all the posts are assigned to. If you have no items in your stack, congratulations your social to-do list is complete! If you have items that you need to remove from this stack, simply change the engagement level to reflect the status of the post.

Tip: There are 3 engagement levels that will cause a post to close and be removed from your My Task Stack: “Reviewed, Closed, No Engagement Required”, “Resolved, No Further Action Required”, “Commented, Closed”.

How do I use this stack to make my days easier?
So what’s the best way to use this stack? Here are a few ways we’ve used it.

Manage Your Items
Keep track of all posts that you are being tasked with and ensure you have given them each a proper response or actions.

Tracking open items
By not closing posts, you’re able to keep going back to an ongoing issue or something that needs in depth research.

Escalation
If you have senior members on your team assigning posts to them versus having them watch the overall feed can be the perfect way to escalate issues.

What ways do you use your My Tasks stack? What ways would help you to understand how to use this better? Do you have any questions around new functionality?