More precisely, how do you identify and formalise your workflow ? Are there tools for that ? Once you have your workflow, how do you consistently stick to an organization ?
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27344010
For folks wandering into these woods, fair warning - you cannot take someone else's workflow, apply it to your way of doing things and hope to reap the benefits.
You can, without realizing it, be in an infinite loop, copying others, till you burn out. There is a reason why posts around organizing thoughts, ideas and tasks have been floating around HN for eternity. Best avoided.
Start with what and why. My way is to imagine that a perfect magical tool/workflow already exists to solve my problem, I just haven't found it yet, then imagine all the ways it makes me better, where and how I will use it, why I can't live without it. Now I have a fairly good way of knowing if this is what I want, does it sound possible or if its a fool's errand.
Only then can I look around for tools and other's solutions and try filling the gaps. I stay away from getting too deep into ready products, they either disappoint, are too flexible or are too rigid.
Personally, I have settled on using many tools (index cards, whiteboard, freeplane, plain text, google docs, excel) using each for what they are really good at, where they are good at. I only use the core features, not the frills, not the unique propositions; makes it easy to replace when they change too much are unavailable or something better comes along. I have a hard either "bulk copy-pastable" or scriptable rule, if a tool supports neither, its just tossed out right in the beginning.
Some people I know like it the other way round, everything in one, familiar, productive tool. Didn't work for me.
+1, I was there, for years. Heck, I am there, still and again. I'm surely going to finish that Zettelkasten script I started in 2012; I just have to reconsider... LOL.
This HN post really resonated with me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17893139
tl;dr for the post -- if you start with a method, you'll very probably end overengineering your system. Organizing your stuff per "use-case" might be more fruitful. Chances are you're not the Niklas Luhmann you think. (Then again, it's also fun to think that Niklas Luhmann was just another regular guy, so the simple "hammers and nails" he crafted might as well be used by a regular person like me. :)
Also, I love forgetting. Maybe our brain isn't that bad a tool, so most of the really important stuff actually "floats on the top" by itself?
I have one list of things to do, simple stuff like "pay bills" "feed cat" etc.
I have sub-lists for every client I'm currently working with, or project I'm working on. I punch in just enough info in to the individual items to jog my memory as to what it was. Often times its something like "read that email" under the "!Client" list.
I have sub-lists for every place I might be where I need to do something while I'm there, i.e.:
@Office for Home @Home for Office @Cabin for Home @Home for Cabin
If I'm at home and I remember I should bring my laptop home because I'll need it this weekend, I put that in "@Office for Home." When I'm at home and I realize I should bring the table saw home from the cabin to use at the house, I put that in "@Cabin for Home," etc.
I bark things at Siri all day and at the end of the day shift things in to the lists they need to be in.
Whenever I have a task that I need to complete that day, I add an entry in the current day's log. If I get it done, I 'x' it. If not, I carry it over to the next day. Of course, for work projects we have Jira to track work as well, but my task list is for things like "set up meeting with so and so" or "get screenshots to so and so" or "start working on ticket 1234". Any meeting notes or random things I think might be worth recording, I put in the log for the day.
For my personal projects, I keep a LOG.md file in the repo for the project and usually a separate TODOs.md since I don't use Jira or anything like that. As new work comes up, I add it to the TODOs file. I also nest tasks just using tabs. It's super simple, but it gets the job done.
I've learned that I don't like relying on outside software for keeping track of tasks. It's just faster for me to type away using vim in a text file. It gets synced with the repo and I don't need to worry about signing in to some cloud software or worrying about them adding/removing/changing features on me (or going under).
I have one for "Morning meetings", which is our Scrum stand-up. I also have one for "Meeting with BA", who is our bigest customer. A third one is "Sync with HQ", which we do every two weeks.
In each of the markdown files I simply keep a date and whatever happened during the meeting, and maybe some actionable points if there is any.
More importantly, I try to fill in questions I need to ask in those meetings so when I have them, I can read them out instead of missing anything important.
Frankly I haven't met any good alert app. I have a "calendar" on mobile but it doesn't work as I expected. What I need is: Say I have an appointment on 2021-07-01 13:00:00, I'd like the app to send me a short message (a notification works too but a short message is preferred) a couple of times on 2021-06-30, and again at 2021-07-01 11:00:00. It sounds simple but frankly none of the apps I tried works like that.
I've used this "system" for years. I wrote a wrapper app to render the Markdown into HTML, with hot reload, but only occasionally use it - most of the time I'm writing and looking at raw Markdown.
One of the files is a journal, for which I have a few Bash aliases to append the current date, one-line note, edit the file, or show in terminal.
At one point I got fed up and designed my own Notions-like clone in Django. It supports markdown and a bunch of commands that are very specific to me, mainly around sentence-level tagging so that I can tag everything and come back to tags later when I feel like it. I find this to be the best approach... It's now a mix of bookmarking tool, to do list, and journal all in one.
To get to this point, I needed to really think intentionally and deeply about what my workflow was like. I had to observe myself and ask why I would stop using certain tools or why I would get overwhelmed.
I also had to be honest with myself: being conscientious takes time and investment... If you want to keep up with yourself and everything you're doing, you need to make time to organize yourself. I didn't really do this before.
My thesis is: Digital Assistants are limited in their functionality due to not knowing enough about me.
For example I can't say: "Hey Siri, my son has a cough. Please book him a doctor's appointment and ask his school for his homework".
The value of having a structured knowledgebase of my life is only going to increase with brain machine interfaces.
Resources around "personal knowledge management systems", "building a second brain", etc seem to be all around stuffing unstructured data into a system (Evernote, Notion, etc). The "Quantified Self" folks seem to be just stuffing a limited set of metrics in a database.
Would anyone have any resources or materials I can research further on this field?
However if they accept emails the functionality shouldn't be too difficult, from the technical perspective.
TBH I think most of the inefficiency of our daily life is due to lack of use of modern technology in banking/schools/doctors/gov/etc. They always argue "oh but it's not safe".
I suspect the limitations around digit assistants are due to a lack of an entity graph, and not the ability to communicate.
For instance my doctor allows for bookings via App, and phone. Furthermore, my digital assistants know who my doctor is, but don’t know who my son’s doctor and teacher is.
I wish my doctor had that...everytime I have to call his secretary to make an appointment.
Forcing to prioritize & focus on 2-3 items for the day gets things done faster than I imagined.
In similar fashion, I also have my week schedule as text file.
RSS reader is also helpful: updates, news, new content - always in chronological order and clearly visible.
Thanks to DuckDuckGo's !bangs I only need to keep only a few bookmarks in my browser, so beside those few, I know every other bookmark is something to-read. Although sometimes I use also Pocket since it's build in Firefox either way.
I regularly check e-mails and delete unneeded ones right away.
Same with files. Not needed = deleted. And I keep them in clear and hierarchical directory structure.
In Fastmail, I make extensives use of labels to be as close as possible to inbox zero. Every email gets a label and gets sorted asap.
This is the results of years of experimentations but this is the longest I've been sticking to a workflow/tools.
Week of May 31
TASK
TASK
01 TASKDONE June 1
] 1400 June 1 Managed Service Provider Review
Bob MSP CEO
Sam MSP Sales engineer
Self
MEETING NOTES
\ What SLA do you provide?
\ Do you have a formal security plan?
= Action item from call treated like a task above
[0]: https://github.com/GothenburgBitFactory/taskwarrior
So I decided to build a tool on my own with help from a friend. Add items to the list board, and they get added to my calendar as and when time is available.
After running the gamut of existing organizer tools, I settled on Org Mode because it's just plain faster, simpler (but not easier!), and more flexible than anything else I've tried.
Also, all your stuff is just in plaintext files on your computer. Most other solutions require a propriety service, which is not where I want to keep the mind map of my life's work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
[1]: https://orgmode.org/
I have a "tasks.org" file that acts as my inbox: I put new tasks in there as I think of them. Each day I will a) do the task, b) schedule it for the future, or c) refile it into the appropriate project.
Each project gets a "<project>.org" file, I keep my TODOs mostly at the top, or interspersed if there's context within the notes of the project (in Org Mode, tasks and notes can be interleaved within a document).
I keep everything synced between computers via Dropbox. I use BeOrg on iOS for mobile organization.
I also use `mu4e` for email, so reading mail and turning it into TODOs takes almost no effort. I try to practice a "getting stuff done" style workflow for communication, and I try to get to inbox zero each day (through replying, archiving, and scheduling a task for me to reply in the future). 90% of the time I fail to hit inbox zero, but I don't let it stress me out.
I used to use Superhuman + Things + Markdown for the equivalent setup: much simpler with Emacs + Org Mode.
With all that said, I still make heavy use of analog notebooks. I find there's no substitute for writing with my own hand (I suspect this is vestigial from the analog education I received).
This made a lot easier to repeat tasks that are done on regular, but not so often basis, like for example having a snippet to copy a database from one server to another. In the end this saves a lot of googling around when I want to do something I did before.
And I mean everything in Apple calendar: meetings, when to take out the garbage, the next step on whatever my latest hobby project is, etc ,etc.
I learned long ago: “If it’s not in the calendar, it’s not real.”
For everything else - Google Keep.
I like Todoist in that it syncs with all my devices and it doesn't force me into a specific paradigm. I keep a simple hierarchical to-do lists, and I have some of my projects as boards (ToDo/Doing/Done) rather than lists. I feel like it helps me spend less time managing my todo list and more time _doing_ things.
Days are divided with (-) character like:
-----------------
At the start of each day I just write a list of todo's and check them throughout the day.
I then copy them to the next day if not completed.
Have been doing this for several years now. I always keep it open as a tab in the IDE.
Will periodically truncate the file and archive it to avoid getting to big.
If I need to remember something, like a recurring todo to give my kids an allowance followupthen really works well for me.
In the past I tried almost every tool, in the end it's the proces. Most tools get in the way of the proces.
Looking to move to something markdown driven in git for personal use though. Most of my tech notes are there already
Imagine being able to alter a diagram automatically depending on your backend/infrastructure? :)
Simplenote lists for private
Only after this can we even begin to discuss "productivity" with respect to information systems. When working with information, you generally do not need great quantities of raw material - you do not have the capacity to "think" about that. You mostly need transformative perspectives, which rarely come pre-digested(that form is teaching). A transformative perspective comes from the repeated application of those principles you study, and from some occasional introduction of chaotic influences to probe and test your ideas.
From this we can come to the conclusion that organization is primarily about filtering and exposure to the serendipitous, which begins with the life obligations that you take on. You don't want everything completely under control, since that would erase the chaos. Neither do you want to feel like there are no predictable elements to hang on to, just one emergency after the next. Either one could be described as an impoverishment.
When we talk about tools and media, that's really a matter of finding the medium you need to think in at that moment and a way to reach it. So, personal collections are a good way to start - I collect and organize according to how I want to think at that moment, versus trying to universalize. When I need to arrive at new concepts I look for ways to bind material together. The literal example that propelled me down this path was in deciding to clear out old gadget boxes last summer by putting all their leftovers in binders, using plastic dividers, pencil bags and pockets. In a loose collection the contents would get lost, but in a binder they become satisfying to browse - a dual purpose of "remove clutter" and "make space" is served by shifting around the physical dimensions and axes of the problem. This same strategy applies to other common physical organizers from bags and trays up to rooms and streets. And on a computer a light amount of hierarchy, combined with lengthy filenames to tag, helps filter, but you have to push the serendipity a little bit harder, since the computer "only does what you tell it". So I am often looking for new ways of getting that.
2, Todos have no value in my life unless I block a chunk of time for tasks explicitly. I block some time for one task and I do only that thing at that time.
3, No social media outside of a 30 minute window per day. Not even when waiting in a queue, or Pomodoro rest gaps.
4, No-email/Slack blocks of 2 hours each. 30 minutes in special cases.
5, I plan my day the night before.
6, Habit-tracking. I plan to a handful of tasks everyday without fail like exercising, reading, and some work/study related stuff. I use a free app for this which does everything I want.
7, I keep a journal where I jot down my long-term, intermediate, and immediate goals. I like to think that it works.
I have tried a hundred things, and these work well.
I don't use the Deep Focus stuff in Forest which require elevated permissions.
The key is to spend a significant amount of time in writing and formatting it. Think tens of minutes in what is roughly a five day period. This really works for me.
By that, I mean I am always aware what I need to do.
By no means I am in a perfect shape. I slack off sometimes, I don't do anything and waste some time.
How long are your rest gaps? 5 minutes is too short for me.
The goal is to not switch context. Social media is awfully bad in this.
If in work, I reply to Slack messages or message from family/friend- if any. They know to call in an emergency and not expect immediate reply to messages.
I have found drinking water and taking a quick stroll being the most effective pomodoro gap actvity. Although it is not always possible.
I’ll try some of these myself. Still haven’t found my ideal cycle times.
How do you fit emails and meetings into your schedule?
By scheduling task-specific pomodoro’s around meetings?
Do you use pomodoro cycles on email and other communication?
Say some urgent situation pops up which requires several emails to be exchanged. Does this throw off your schedule?