How to Use Follow Up Boss Tasks Without Getting Overwhelmed

This is the readable version of our video walkthrough.

Ask around and you'll hear two completely opposite opinions about Follow Up Boss tasks. Some swear by them. Others tell you to avoid the tab entirely because it turns into a wall of hundreds, sometimes closer to a thousand, unopened items that nobody works through. Both camps are right, depending on how the tasks are actually managed. The tool isn't the problem. The approach to it usually is.

The Three Views: Today, Overdue, and Future

The Tasks tab splits everything into three lists: today's tasks, overdue tasks, and future tasks. A filter on the right narrows what you're looking at by type, follow-up, call, email, text, thank you, or completed, which matters most when you're working in blocks. Making calls for the next hour, filter down to calls only and work straight through the list.

Creating a Task the Right Way

From any contact profile, creating a task takes a title, a type, a due date, and an assignee, which defaults to you but can be handed to any team member on the account. A quick follow-up shortcut skips the full form entirely, useful when all you need is "check back in two weeks."

If you manage a team, the same filter lets you look at any single person's task list or everyone's at once, which is the fastest way to spot whether a specific agent's follow-up is falling behind before it becomes a client complaint.

Clearing the Backlog

If overdue tasks have piled up past the point of being useful, a clear overdue tasks button wipes them in one action. Worth using carefully, since it removes the item rather than completing it, but useful for resetting after a backlog has grown stale.

Tip One: Tag Anything Truly Important

For tasks that genuinely can't slip, add a short marker word, something like "imp," directly into the task title when creating it. Later, inside a long task list, a quick search (Command+F on a Mac, Ctrl+F on Windows) for that marker pulls up only the tasks flagged that way.

Tip Two: Stop Working From the Tasks Tab Directly

This is the bigger shift. Instead of opening the Tasks tab and trying to plow through everything in one sitting, work tasks from inside your Smart Lists and Collections instead. Build a collection that mirrors how the day actually runs, a prospecting list for the morning block, a hot-leads list for follow-up, and move through each list one contact at a time.

The reason this works better than the raw Tasks tab is that a smart list is already scoped to a specific slice of the business, so working through it never feels like facing an undifferentiated pile. This is exactly how we set up daily rhythms with clients: define what the morning, midday, and end-of-day blocks look like, then build the collections to match.

A More Advanced Filter: Combining Stage or Tag With "Next Task Not Empty"

For a sharper view, go to People, add a filter for "my next task," and set it to not empty. The value comes from stacking a second filter on top: narrow by stage or tag, hot leads only, for example, so the list only shows people who are both high priority and have an open task waiting.

One detail matters here: use whichever field your team actually relies on for priority, stage or tags, not both inconsistently. Mixing the two, or assuming both are equally populated, is how a filter that looks complete quietly leaves people out. Add a "phone is good" condition on top and the result is a short, workable list.

The One Filter to Run This Through

Whichever approach fits your team, the test is the same: can you look at your task list right now and know exactly which five contacts matter most today? If the honest answer is that you'd have to scroll to find out, the structure needs tightening before adding more tasks on top of it.

Where This Fits Into the Bigger Picture

Tasks tell you what's due. They don't tell you which of those things actually moves the business forward today, or build the daily rhythm that keeps the list from becoming background noise. That's the operating layer above the feature, and it's the difference between a task list that gets worked and one that gets abandoned at 200 unread items.

If you want a clear read on whether your own task setup is built to be worked daily or just quietly growing, that's exactly what a system audit is built to show you.