Comment by ktamura | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ktamura | Hacker News Reader

Over the years, I've tried many digital to-do lists, including one I wrote myself. Today, I just use a notebook.

The trick that I made work is to have two to-do lists: daily and quarterly.

For daily, it's simple. I have a variation of the Bullet Journal [1], but interleaved with meeting notes, ideas, etc.

But many ideas are bigger than what you can accomplish/benchmark on a daily basis. For those, I have two pages per quarter that I fill with "quarterly goals". I try to keep the list under 20-30 items and keep them high-level. Every week, I look at the same two pages and make sure that I am making progress toward them. If not, I go back to my daily notes and see if I worked on the right stuff the previous week. This is a variation on the idea that I stole from Aaron Levie [2].

For me, the tactile/tangible nature of paper note-taking, as well as its flexibility in formatting, has been incredibly useful.

[1] http://bulletjournal.com/

[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/3021586/most-productive-people-b...

When I worked at MetaDesign back in the late nineties and early zeros we had something called RedBooks.

RedBooks were most of the work we had done for a specific client printed out in tabloid size bound into a spiral back book and put on a large shelf system.

We also had a matriculate digital folder system with projects, searchable and the same pages as PDF plus much more accessible from your computer.

Guess which one we used the most?

With the RedBooks it was very easy to pull out the book and look through it for inspiration, talk about how we did this or that and so on and with the book we only put in the things that where somehow relevant.

The computer folders on the other hand had everything because, yeah well why not. But what they had in quantity it lacked in human relatable tangibility.

Computers are great when the amount of information become so waste that it's impossible to manually search through it all or if you need to share a lot of your things with other people.

It turns out that for all the great things computers can help us do it still haven't solved tangibility.

The Bullet Journal looks interesting, but to me it feels much more like it should be a tablet app, than in a physical notebook (mainly due to migration of items, but this is of course achievable with an erasable pen or pencil).

I say this as someone that is trying to use a physical notebook more & better, and looking for good organisational/notekeeping schemes.

An app never works for productivity stuff.

It would be interesting to hear your experiences on this, such as what apps you've tried and had fail for you in terms of productivity?

I would agree with what you've said to a point, but this kind of statement needs expanding.

For my wife and I, we're using Wunderlist (bought my Microsoft in 2015) and we can assign things to each other, star them as important, comment on tasks, leaves notes, set reminders, and so on. It's a... wunderful (har! har!) app and so far it's UI doesn't get in the way. I'm just waiting for the moment we hit the limitations of the free version and have to spend nearly AUD$130/user/year (USD -> AUD) to maintain its place in our household.

I've tried OneNote, WorkFlowy and a few no name Android apps.

Platform issues and friction is far too high. Even just loading up the browser, or context switching to a different tab. Plus... if your work is of mathematical nature, it's an added headache.

I use the simple notes app on my Huawei phone. It's just notepad.exe basically but helps me a lot

My issue is latency from _idea in head_ to adequately captured somewhere.

A book is usually open in front of me with a pen at the ready. An application.. well it depends, but best-case scenario is that it's in a easy-to-switch-to window and is natural to just get the idea down without jumping through hoops.

As an aside from a sufferer of ADHD, I think Augmented Reality tech would be a killer platform for an in-place TODO/Note/Reminder/assistant.

A small boost to that workflow is the ability to unlock and launch apps in one swipe but that still leaves the power button, optional pin, and never being quite sure what state the app will resume in. Edit: Forgot to include the animations that run slower than my hand can move.

I've tried a zillion to do apps, most of them are just not very good and add a lot of annoying overhead or have super specialized workflows that have tons of shortcomings. I started using a bullet journal in June and it's been a fantastic experience. This is what sold me on the idea: https://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelwmiller/how-to-start-a-bullet...

It's amazing how well organized you can be when you keep track of stuff better.

Another thing I've done is started keeping a sort of checklist/timeline for morning, mid-day, and end of day to make developing habits easier as well as just keeping up on to-do stuff. One of the most useful things has been to add some elements from things like this, which is a significant quality of life boost: http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2016/02/evening-ritual

Also, journals are great for facilitating things like CBT for anxiety, depression, ADHD, etc.

also pen-and-paper note taker here.

there's something satisfying about physically crossing off a list when a pen after spending 10+hrs typing

Very true, but in the real world where what's urgent goes before what's important, you are often forced to reschedule stuff, and the pen&paper approach clearly is in disadvantage here.

My solution is a dynamic todo called myTinyTodo [1], a very simple app where I can sort stuff by project, deadline, importance, etc.

[1] http://www.mytinytodo.net/

I reschedule stuff all the time, it's not a huge deal, you just copy a few items from one list into another, it takes a few seconds usually. And actually, I find I like it this way because if I hit a point where I realize I'm rescheduling too much stuff too often it tells me that I need to either follow through more often or not be so optimistic in scheduling things so much.

Committing to do a thing in a given time period should be kind of a big deal. If you don't need to commit to a thing in a specific time, then just leave it in a more general master list (e.g. monthly, or generic) and commit to it when you have the time.

I also use paper: 1) master todo list: "list of lists" what neets to be done for each category / project 2) calendar with daily todo list: what from master todo list needs to be done today or at specific day

Everything without built-in three letter agency spying... I use Moleskine.

Moleskine squared notepads are my favourite writing materials in the world. It would be nice if they weren't so expensive, but it's worth the cost.

I prefer taking notes on paper in a spiral notebook. When it fills up, I run it through the scanner.

Do you carry your notebook with yourself everywhere?

Actually for my personal todos I just use a page of paper. I don't carry it around but sometimes I copy some tasks on a paper snippet and put it into my pocket. The very nice thing about the paper list is that it has a limit. So I don't end up having more todos than I can handle.

However for work I like Asana. Paper would be too impractical...

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