Todo apps are meant for robots
blog.frantic.im
blog.frantic.im
I used to try and set up the perfect system for my notes. I got caught in endless cycles of coming up with some structure, finding new tools, etc. — only to then barely ever write down anything because it never quite fit into any of the boxes I'd prepared.
I used to try out a new todo app every other month, enthusiastic that this time I'd find the system that would finally enable me to never let anything fall through the cracks.
I'd plan out the perfect pipeline of bookmark - triage - read/watch/listen so that I could stay on top of every great talk, article, interview or book anyone had ever created and shared with the world. You can probably guess what happened.
Then, for some reason, I just got more... relaxed? at some point. Have a thought? Just make a note, doesn't matter if I'll ever look at it again or it will still make sense in a week. Sometimes I go back and expand on things. Sometimes I event write something out of it. Most times I don't and that's fine. Find something cool? Just bookmark. Maybe I'll look through them in a moment of boredom one day soon, maybe the never-ending influx of hot new content means I'll never get around to it. Whatever. Want to or think I should do something? Make a task, don't set a date, maybe I'll get back to it, maybe it turns out I don't want or need to do it ever. Got something you keep putting off? Maybe just delete it after the tenth time, it'll come back to you if it's worth it.
In fact, it was now possible for Rimmer to revise solidly for three months and not learn anything at all.
The first week of study, he would always devote to the construction of a revision timetable. At school Rimmer was always at his happiest colouring in geography maps: under his loving hand, the ice-fields of Europa would be shaded a delicate blue, the subterranean silica deposits of Ganymede would be rendered, centimetre by painstaking centimetre, a bright and powerful yellow, and the regions of frozen methane on Pluto slowly became a luscious, inviting green. Up until the age of thirteen, he was constantly head of the class in geography. After this point, it became necessary to know and understand the subject, and Rimmer's marks plunged to the murky depths of 'F' for fail.
He brought his love of cartography to the making of revision timetables. Weeks of patient effort would be spent planning, designing and creating a revision timetable which, when finished, were minor works of art.
Every hour of every day was subdivided into different study periods, each labelled in his lovely, tiny copperplate hand; then painted over in watercolours, a different colour for each subject, the colours gradually becoming bolder and more urgent shades as the exam time approached. The effect was as if a myriad tiny rainbows had splintered and sprinkled across the poster-sized sheet of creamwove card.
The only problem was this: because the timetables often took seven or eight weeks, and sometimes more, to complete, by the time Rimmer had finished them the exam was almost on him. He'd then have to cram three months of astronavigation revision into a single week. Gripped by an almost deranging panic, he'd then decide to sacrifice the first two days of that final week to the making of another timetable. This time for someone who had to pack three months of revision into five days.
Because five days now had to accommodate three months' work, the first thing that had to go was sleep. To prepare for an unrelenting twenty-four hours a day sleep-free schedule, Rimmer would spend the whole of the first remaining day in bed – to be extra, ultra fresh, so he would be able to squeeze three whole months of revision into four short days.
Within an hour of getting up the next morning, he would feel inexplicably exhausted, and start early on his supply of Go-Double-Plus caffeine tablets. By lunchtime he'd overdose, and have to make the journey down to the ship's medical unit for a sedative to help him calm down. The sedative usually sent him off to sleep, and he'd wake up the following morning with only three days left, and an anxiety that was so crippling he could scarcely move. A month of revision to be crammed into each day.
At this point he would start smoking. A lifelong non-smoker, he'd become a forty-a-day man. He'd spend the whole day pacing up and down his room, smoking three or four cigarettes at a time, stopping occasionally to stare at the titles in his bookcase, not knowing which one to read first, and popping twice the recommended dosage of dog-worming tablets, which he erroneously believed to contain amphetamine.
Realizing he was getting nowhere, he'd try to get rid of his soul-bending tension by treating himself to an evening in one of Red Dwarf's quieter bars. There he would sit, in the plastic oak-beamed 'Happy Astro' pub, nursing a small beer, grimly trying to be light-hearted and totally relaxed. Two small beers and three hours of stomach-knotting relaxation later, he would go back to his bunk and spend half the night awake, praying to a God he didn't believe in for a miracle that couldn't happen.
Two days to go, and ravaged by the combination of anxiety, nicotine, caffeine tablets, alcohol he wasn't used to, dog-worming pills, and overall exhaustion, he would sleep in till mid-afternoon.
After a long scream, he would rationalize that the day was a total write-off, and the rest of the afternoon would be spent shopping for the three best alarm clocks money could buy. This would often take five or six hours, and he would arrive back at his sleeping quarters exhausted, but knowing he was fully prepared for the final day's revision before his exam.
Waking at four-thirty in the morning, after exercising, showering and breakfasting, he would sit down to prepare a final, final revision table, which would condense three months of revision into twelve short hours. This done, he would give up and go back to bed. Maybe he didn't know a single thing about astronavigation, but at least he'd be fresh for the exam the next day.
Which is why Rimmer failed exams.
--Grant Naylor, Red Dwarf, 1989
I think we all see a bit of Rimmer in ourselves when it comes to preparing for for an exam.
That being said, in the spirit of my comment — I honestly don't care too much about what I might be missing due to sites going down etc. anymore. The truly great stuff I save somewhere offline, but that's one or two levels past all the random things I currently use bookmarks for.
Nowadays I just use the Notes app from my mac. I keep a primary note named "daily" where I write at the top the date and everything interesting for the day. If there is anything important enough I want to keep it for more days I move it to a separate note. If I realize I need something I did 3 weeks ago it is easy to find too. It syncs with my phone, works offline, and imposes as little structure as possible which is something I like for the reasons you explained.
Of course you could find a better 3rd party mail client, probably a better Notes app too, but the improvement in terms of your productivity will be marginal (if not negative in some instances). Good OS makers copy many of the good things from 3rd party apps anyway, right?
Team collaboration and productivity though is a different beast of a problem. I hate Trello, Asana, Jira - all of them. Because this kind of tools are generally B2B, the decision to buy is usually made by the wrong people. They are generally made to please the decision makers more than the actual every day users. "Let's use X, it has the timeline feature!". Well how about its UI for actually dealing with tasks (creating, closing, moving, etc) is pretty awful?
All in all it feels so strange when looking back at the decades of the evolution of the PC (and the Internet!) that we still haven't figured out how the computers can help us collaborate more efficiently. But then maybe it's because the way we collaborate changes all the time - just take the move from corporate to modern startup-y way of running companies.
I tried out some complicated templates, tried making my own but in the end I've gone back to a pretty unorganised Trello style list in Notion.
Every time I use it I feel bad that I'm not using it 'properly', in a way it almost has so many features that it becomes too much and I use none of them.
Nowadays the only tool I'm using is https://workflowy.com. It's basically an infinitely nested list that you can expand / collapse or zoom into. Extremely fast to dump items into and delete afterwards.
I use it as a cache or stack for my immediate more complicated developer tasks. Once something's done - delete it.
Here's a referral link if you'd like to get me (and yourself) more free items: https://workflowy.com/invite/200f24b.lnx
Exactly, that's what makes it so great, but also so hard. Maybe it'd be easier if I didn't have a load of notes I want to keep already.
If I were to take a guess about why its so hard to know where to start (truth be told I dont really know myself), it would be where those notes go and where new notes go. But I guess the point of this "system" or lack thereof is that it doesn't matter, and if it does my brain will remind me of it until its done.
I've got some nice notebooks arriving tomorrow, maybe using them instead will help me transition (the extra friction to take notes will perhaps make me take less)
For me this works well, because: * I don't forget to get things done * I don't have to think about what I need to do, the app shows me a daily list * I get a small feeling of accomplishment for every task I complete (gamificaion), and for finishing all my tasks (daily task inbox zero).
It works for me.
Keeping habits and todo/tasks list separately helps me prevent the latter from monopolizing habit time.
ps. Flat Habits is backed by org (if that's important to you), but this is purely an internal detail if you just want a simple app.
If you schedule a task as "every Wednesday" then a few weeks later reschedule the task to Friday it doesn't ask "this instance or all of them?" or something. That entire task series is now scheduled for that particular Friday, and once you've ticked it off you won't get any more reminders ever.
If I'm doing something wrong, please let me know. :)
Would you mind sending a report via https://todoist.com/help?
I will do the same now (I didn't as I don't reschedule recurring tasks often)
It would be super convenient and would stop my checking out every god damn todo app that comes across my radar too
I know, break tasks down further if they need a start date, whatever. It doesn't work for me, I tried. I don't want to spend my life organising a todo app I just want to do the things in the todo app and then go lie down
Honestly I'd prefer due date be replaced with start date as far as which is more useful. Using Todoist in that way doesn't work well either, I tried.
> We keep adding things we "should get to at some point"
Maybe it's time for a completely new perspective on TODO lists.
I think people underestimate the amount of pain that comes from, over and over again, looking at a list of things you can't do anything about at a moment X.
The only TODO app that I've found get this at least 95% right is Omnifocus with its billions of settings. Though there's still sometimes a wish to have a "this part of the todo tree is still under construction" node.
I think that this absolutely fundamental failing has soured everyone on almost all of these kinds of apps. Which is a shame, because _if you put in the work to actually write out stuff_, it becomes much easier to get stuff done, and not feel bad about stuff.
People drag on GTD but David Allen is basically right (at least if you are living in the mindset of wanting to really work yourself hard). It's the task management equivalent of doing your budgetting seriously. Yeah, sometimes the problem is just that you need to make more money, but when you have your budget under control a lot of stress just disappears.
Task accomplishable doesn’t say nothing about our energy levels which is somewhat of a buzzword but relevant in the context of task lists.
For example I could have “Call mechanic to set up service” but the person answering the call can be an ass through the phone so it’s never pleasant chat. Or you might be introvert and that would require mental gymnastics or there might be a lunch break at specific time or you could get rerouted to some other time.
Hundreds of little factors comes in and sometime inputting all of them into system (I tried!) requires more effort than just getting stuff out.
By putting a dozen todos together in a list, your level of worry about that list as a whole is going to rise to the most worrisome todo. It’s poisoning the well. Now you don’t want to look at the todo list at all, because it becomes a source of anxiety, even if most of the items on the list are trivial or even enjoyable.
(I put off suing my old landlord for about a year this way. On the one hand, I probably should've done it sooner; on the other hand, I might well have spent months just stressing about that, whereas instead I channelled that avoidance into dealing with a bunch of other tasks)
https://github.com/vlisivka/bash-modules/blob/master/bash-mo...
They are easy to make.
TODO lists are aspirational, not pragmatic. We make them for someone else, the person we want to be. Unfortunately, we'll never be that person.
I had an idea of a TODO list app where things "expired" into a permanent section of the app, to remind you of all the aspirational tasks you never got around to. Unfortunately I never got around to making it.
I didn't find anything so made it myself and have been using it for 2 years. As it worked for me I recently worked on making it available to others.. Not sure it is ready for prime time yet (will implement localization for week day names after my vacation), but it works and can be used: https://thisweek.rocks.
(Feel free to drop me some feedback here or https://twitter.com/thisweekrocks).
Brilliant. Like the article says, I stopped using the TODO app when I had dozens of tasks in my list and I used to see that backlog every day, made me even more depressed.
Some people actually organize their day-to-day "stuff that they need to do" through these lists.
I like the use-by date on to-do items though. You should make a note of that somewhere. ;)
GTD has a lot of solutions for various types of todo list problems, but then again, you have to be a quite conscientious person to follow through on all of the details of it. At which point you probably have no problem with plain scribbles on some loose paper. My wife makes todo lists all the time (like, she's taking to someone and while she's talking she'll pull out some paper and write things down completely unrelated to the conversation, without skipping a beat) but she's very conscientious about actually doing those tasks, so she doesn't have a need for more complicated systems than small piles of papers with things that need to be done.
Whereas I make lists with breakdowns and several dimensions of categories and preferably according to a clearly defined, all-encompassing system, and it needs to work on all devices and include everything from what I need to buy for dinner tonight to my life goals, and then those notes become a job in themselves and I say fuck this and throw them all out and try the same thing again 6 months later. I'd much rather be like my wife.
> GTD has a lot of solutions for various types of todo list problems, but then again, you have to be a quite conscientious person to follow through on all of the details of it. At which point you probably have no problem with plain scribbles on some loose paper.
I kinda disagree with that. Like I agree that you need to be studious, but not to the level of not needing the organization. "Being able to orgainze a list of tasks" and "being able to hold a list of tasks in your head" or "being able to work off the list of tasks without it being organized" are different things on different axes.
I would also much rather be like you wife, but absent that I'll at least do a thing that I know is better than nothing. Sometimes the results get thrown out but nothing is zero effort.
I’ve not yet found a decent alternative. I think a better book could be written on it though. I think the system could be explained in fewer words making it accessible to more people. David’s book is a good read but you probably have to be very serious about fixing this part of your life to put in the effort required to understand and implement it.
This can be done with no app at all though, which is what 43 folders is all about. David Allen says often in his book that the exact app or notebook you use doesn’t matter as long as it works for you.
So one heuristic I do is is try to start my day setting my “intentions” — identifying a handful of things on the list I would be pleased to have finished by days end even if absolutely nothing else on the list is touched.
It's true that TODO apps have a lot of bad aspects, but that's no reason to give up and hand yourself over to the exploitative dystopia of global industrial emotional manipulation. That's like hoping to go to hell after you die because you heard the devil makes the trains run on time.
Personally, I think a big part of the appeal TODO apps is the rush of optimism you get from adopting a new system. That's the part that gets people excited, all the marketing is build to whip it up, and it actually makes a positive difference in people's lives, temporarily. Believing you're going to live differently and get more shit down will, in fact, help you get more shit done. But I think we would be better off looking past that when we evaluate productivity apps. You have to be honest and ask yourself, if I am the driving force, if the motivation and belief are coming from my baseline instead of from how I feel pumped up on product marketing, then how useful will the app be? Because that's what you'll get after the first week.
Want regular artificial boosts to your belief in yourself and your optimism about your life? Don't shop for TODO apps. Hop cults, or hire a motivational life coach or something. Do yourself the favor of enjoying some continuity in your productivity tools.
Motivation, tenacity, and perspective are not really within the scope of todo lists.
It's worth pointing out that David Allen is very outspoken on his position that you should NOT use a todo list. He writes it out clearly in his book. This is probably the most common misconception about GTD. I've even heard people say they gave up on GTD because todo lists don't work for them. Okay...
I use a task manager but I don't have a todo list. The standard usage of a todo list, where you dump any task that may or may not be worth doing at some point, is at best a distraction from real project management. To get things done, you have to decide on the one or few things you should be working on at a point in time. A todo list doesn't help with that.
If you have 100 things to do, certainly a list helps you at least not forget most of them, before you even start work.
I don't know what David Allen recommends, but if everyone is left with the impression he recommends TODO lists and he doesn't, it might be because the alternative is hazy and vaporous and poorly defined.
I scanned your answer for that alternative and it wasn't there, either.
Consider grocery shopping. You have 20 products to buy. Does a shopping list help? Uhm, heck yes. Otherwise you'd need to go to the store 10 times and not one time.
Well shopping lists, are just a TODO list in the context of a grocery store.
Issue reports on GitHub and other bugtracking systems are TODO lists in the context of software development.
Medical checklists enumerate all required steps in carrying out procedures. That's a TODO list in the context of medical practice.
I can go on forever. So, clearly, the statement "TODO lists don't work" is false. It contradicts reality. And the supposed alternative is apparently unmentionable. Odd.
Maybe we should clarify what is meant by "it works" or "doesn't work", because in general it only means "it's effective for certain uses" and it is effective for certain uses. No, a TODO list won't necessarily motivate you, unless your lack of motivation is specifically due to confusion what you're supposed to do. But I'm very suspicious that any similar "mechanical" alternative would work either.
Gamification works because it draws you into its own world. Posting comments, like mine and most of them, is low effort. Playing a game with colorful characters doing cute things is low effort. Checking for new tweets is low effort. All those are low effort things. This is why it's easy to be motivated by a system that gamifies those low effort actions.
I really doubt any game would motivate you to do an actual 9 to 5 job for years.
Maybe a lot of people just read the short blog posts on the internet for how to setup a tool to implement his system. A lot of the ones I’ve seen (with the notable exception of one I found showing how to implement it in Org-mode) get the methodology completely wrong. So maybe it’s just the bad examples are copied?
People should just buy and read his book. It was updated a few years ago for the modern world (but I guess even that edition is now probably dated). Also there’s even a workbook available too to help drill it in for people that prefer that way of examples.
He actually defines a specific framework in detail. But most people can't be bothered to read the book.
> Consider grocery shopping. You have 20 products to buy. Does a shopping list help? Uhm, heck yes. Otherwise you'd need to go to the store 10 times and not one time.
A shopping list works because it very much isn't a TODO list - it's a well-scoped list of things that you are going to do in a particular place at a particular time. If you started dumping random non-shopping tasks on your shopping list, it would be a lot less effective.
Also it’s not so much a system for getting things done, than it is a system for clearing the mind so that when you ARE able to do some work, you are able to just do it. Mind like water.
Also
> In fact the advanced solution technology lies in the hands of productivity enemies: social media apps and games.
Please let’s not. Harvesting dark patterns also has mental side effects that we are well aware of now (either you deplete your good will or you keep going on fueled by negative emotions)
My tweaks to todo.txt, and some helpful Emacs Lisp, is at: https://www.neilvandyke.org/todotxt/
For work project management, I'm recently using GitLab Issues and Board, with my own labels for urgency and Kanban state. (This isn't quite enough for large project planning, for which I usually use Gantt heavily. But hopefully the next time I need that, there'll be an easy way to link the work breakdown structure and dependencies to all the GitLab-based data capture and workflow the team is doing.)
* It seems you use your list for scheduling as well. I prefer to just use a calendar (calcurse) for this kind of things, I only use dates in my TODO list to know when the item was created, so that I can reevaluate it if I see it stays there for too long (and you can have a cronjob for that).
* I use different lists for inbox and waiting. Depending on how you display your tasks (you can just avoid showing the @waiting ones), that could be the same result. I prefer to have smaller lists (i.e. getting an empty main list means I'm really done and I can see what I wanna do next).
* I tend to use priorities instead of your @then, but that's also not nice. Or I just don't append it to the list: I can do that once I have completed the current task, and maybe I'll have to revisit. If it's something complex enough, it should be documented elsewhere anyway.
* People are also contexts to me, I just use a prefix, e.g. @p_neilv.
This one is so good and true.
Those are some big assumptions and sweeping generalizations apparently made by the author; for example, my system leverages Roam Research. In Roam, a key bit of UX is to type cmd+enter to prefix any block element (Roam's atomic unit, renderered as an HTML `<li>` list item) with a TODO checkbox, or to toggle its presence and state (TODO|DONE|nil). "DONE" items persist in the UI wherever you created them. I take it further than leaving signs of my progress around -- I tag the more significant ones with `#FTW` ("for the win") to ensure I give myself credit and opportunity to celebrate. When I do my weekly review / planning sessions, the "DONE" items, and the wins, play a role.
> The amount of things one can customize is really large, but making all this decisions has a cost.
"I bought this hammer the other day. Every time I hammer a nail in, the hammer doesn't vibrate and play a tune to give me a sense of accomplishment. What gives?"
Has anyone considered that if you're looking to external means to feel a sense of accomplishment, you're relying on meaningless short-term gratification?
If you just trust in your own mind, it will manage priority for you and get better the more you trust it. You rarely forget important things (they have an immediate need and make it known). Small stuff just mentally shuffles themselves to the back of the mind, if a few fall off the table, it's not going to cause any significant impact.
Doing this removes all the guilt of having big lists that need daily attention (where you feel you need a todo list to manage your todo list). This way I know I am tackling the important things, which are also what make me feel better as I know I have made an impact on my day. I am not going to start / end the day with a list of everything I have not done yet.
This feels like a much more human experience to me. As they say 'don't sweat the small stuff'
Since then I just keep a list of 3-5 topics in my head that are important to me at some level and that’s it. It's a list of "these are the things I actually care about".
The underlying realization is: you can't get everything done. We're probably deluded by that brief period in our lives - as a student or early in our careers- where it was actually possible to get everything done, because we were being given so little responsibility to manage. The moment you become in some way "successful", leading a team, being a parent or whatever, your TODOs will far outweigh the time you have available to get them all done. Plus anyone working in startups / digital will always work in a space where the amount of useful work that could be done vastly exceeds the available time to do them.
The answer to me is we need software that makes us "smarter" in managing what's most important - our time. One example of this to me was Google Inbox, which for a brief year or two actually made me feel like I was managing my email in a clever way, enabling me to "scale up" and not waste time on the tool. And sadly Google killed it while pretending they'd ported the "best features" to GMail...
And unfortunately there's a big problem I see in software in general. There doesn't seem to be enough money in building things that make people "smarter", truly more efficient. The money seems to be in making things addictive... so I'll stick to the list in my head.
The original designer of inbox actually released a chrome extension a couple of years ago which brings much of the experience back.
It's not a perfect clone, but it helps a lot. https://simpl.fyi/
I find the small stuff a constant drag on my attention, like a headache, and if I have some hugely important thing then that's even worse - I can't think about anything else. Putting stuff in a list and trusting myself to handle the list lets me focus on what I'm currently doing without worrying about forgetting something that I can't currently do anything about. Using technology to make our lives easier is also a very human experience :).
But I don't feel guilt from my lists - I separate the stuff I need to do from the stuff I might want to do one day, and I recognise that most of the latter will never get done and prune things off it pretty aggressively.
It's an incredibly customizable app that lets you create a ToDo app that works for you.
Unfortunately the web page doesn't make it clear how customizable it is, and how many unique features it has, but this may give you an idea [2].
They've built the app based on productivity / procrastination science and have a lot of "strategies"[0] to help you deal with different issues you might be facing like "analysis paralysis", "procrastination", "prioritization", "overwhelm", "time management", etc.
Their team is very helpful and responsive and help you figure out your best workflow. It is a breath of fresh air really. If this sounds like an ad, it's because it really is that good.
If the OP resonates with you, you really should give Marvin a shot.
[0] https://help.amazingmarvin.com/en/collections/1139197-strate...
- closed loops for stuff that would otherwise occupy my thoughts while programming
- understanding and aplication of what makes me either not start or think about something (project) constantly
- ability to drop and return to it and just continue
- differentiation between what is a must do and nice to do
- separating emotional context for a protocol one ( usefull for things that upset me but must be dealt with)
Bad things
- overusing the system as it is very effective and placing way of the mark projects that you wish to do and that drag on to irrelevance, especially the inbox filled with thoughts rather than something useful.
- it requires at least weekly maintenance, especially when the structure is new to the user
- lists can get convoluted , amended by understanding that you can and should add remove entire lists or even make lists context based.
Bad parts can be overcame but it requires a deeper understanding of gtd and knowing that your gtd flow is ment to be upgraded, reworked and much less structural and rigid in some places. I am currently at my v2 for gtd and it is much easier to maintain while providing me with pretty much same benefits, there is going to be v3.
Overall it helped me immensely to clear my ram when working and for that at least it is worth it
For recurring tasks and meetings I use a calendar.
2. You can get Loop Habit Tracker to automatically put the things you do on time at the top so it's easy to get started. You can archive things you don't want to focus on, to reduce the size of the list.
3. I feel good when the list gets shorter.
4. If you have the easy tasks at the top, it's easy to get started.
5. Tasks.org lets you color things by priority. I never bother because I keep my list short and hide things until a week/day before they're due.
6. Tasks.org can do subtasks. I think doing such granular stuff in an app is limited and I prefer to just scribble some notes on paper, but I understand more could be done.
7. Tasks.org lets you view categories.
I've never found an app that does everything I want, so I think you're right in that a lot more could be done, but I've no interest in writing Java or messing about with virtual machines etc. so I'm quite happy with the options I've got on my phone. Overall, I use two apps, paper and my own note taking system on my desktop (for quickly taking notes that come back later, which I can postpone, search through etc.)
Some people are more conscientious, and they probably don't need many reminders. I'm not so conscientious, and my process helps me keep going, and I would rather make it all as robotic as possible so I don't have to deliberate.
I’m leaning towards it’s impossible, but would like to hear what others think.
I use a leaky bucket metaphor in my todo lists... if a given task sits on a list for too long, then it should more or less fall off. It wasn't as important as you thought. But this is anathema to how most of these systems work.
The key is to really address your feelings of guilt over the whole process of just forgetting about shit that was never that important to begin with.
Which I think is probably the biggest inherent problem with TODO apps (and Jira backlogs).
Some people have "weird requirements" and even those can be gotten right thanks to very good configurable searches and views. The competition is miles behind Omnifocus (I think the fact it started as a local app and not a web app helps, cuz you're not worrying about "heavy queries" or whatnot)
I tried to map out the space of info that I need to track in my engineering job:
1) Tasks from emails 2) Meeting notes with details of people who participated 3) Project related tasks that can have a long format and can be tagged/ delegated 4) Scratchpad for unrefined ideas 5) Detailed documentation for completed technical tasks / ideas 6) FIFO list of high priority small daily tasks
I try to fight the above battle of information organization with a combination of MS Outlook, Onenote, Github boards, MS Todo, physical Sticky notes, a physical notebook and scratchpad, but it is messy.
I occasionally try to find alternatives (notion, bear, trello etc) but no luck so far
In Outlook I mark emails that I want to respond to/deal with later as "unread" or else apply the "followup" flag depending on how much work responding will take. There are downsides but I have so far been able to keep the scheme manageable (single-digit quantities with the unread/followup tags at any given time).
I use a paper notebook, physical sticky notes, and scraps of paper for general notes depending on how ephemeral their importance is.
I use Onenote for meeting notes and a running to-do list, as well as a rough knowledge base, but it's far from perfect:
- You can organize notes but you are sort of locked into the organization scheme that you start with. If you discover some orthogonal knowledge organization/symmetry across topics, there's not a good way to reorganize. For instance, say a certain topic gets discussed in different contexts in different weekly meetings. If you already have note sections with deep histories for Meeting 1 and for Meeting 2, how do you link instances of Topic A across meetings in some useful way?
- For to-do lists, it's easy to start with one list of all your tasks, but as these get complicated with subtasks, you might organize them into different sections, and eventually different pages... but now the to-do list is actually spread across fifteen different note sections, and are you really going to read each one at the start of each day?
Example frontends would be things like "Wheel of Do" where you spin the wheel and it lands on an item, Castle Wolfenstien 2.5D shooter where a todo item is an enemy, a Star Trek style control panel, etc.
Like I said, its a glimmer of an idea but it handles the two things I have problems with in any todo app: an ever expanding backlog and getting bored with the UI.
Please build it someone, I don't have the time. :)
1. No dates. Instead I had sublists by timeframe: Today, Tomorrow, This Week, Weekend, Next Week, Some Day. And it was easy to move an item between sublists. It was easy to move things up and down to indicate next up. Every morning I would scan the Today and Tomorrow items, and move them around to suit my plan for the day.
I don't want or expect my To Do list to stop me from procrastinating. Rather I want it to support healthier procrastination by never letting me totally forget the things I keep putting off.
2. One thing I realized is that weekend task is different than a weekday task. I'm not going to mow my lawn on a weekday. Conversely many tasks require a business to be open and cannot be done on the weekend. On weekday mornings I don't want to be staring at a list of my weekend chores.
3. When you completed an item, it was crossed out but visible until you deleted it. Delicious positive reinforcement.
One important insight is that a To Do list is not to keep track of all the things you need to do. It's to keep track of the annoying things only. You won't forget to do things you look forward to doing.
Have a look at https://can.do if you're interested.
@op would be interested to see your list of 13 'strategies to help me get things done'!
If it's a chore to add a task, I won't add them. If it's a chore to go through tasks, I won't come back to the app.
It's also a really important point about some tasks being inherently different in scale to others, and the importance of separating them.
I feel like many todo apps focus too much on being a "todo app" rather than actually trying to get you to get things done. All this tagging and categorizing and such are features that take effort and time for me to manage, which in turn help make those apps into huge graveyards of stuff to do, which in turn make me want to not open them ever again.
IMO a todo apps that is blank most of the time is the best. Meaning, you haven't got anything you need to do. Help me keep track of small tasks, and repeating tasks, and let me either complete them or postpone them. If there's something I've postponed too many times, just delete it. It shoudn't become a notes app, it's about getting stuff done.
[0]: https://elemental.medium.com/dont-worry-you-can-t-deplete-yo...
> But while the early ego-depletion concepts appear to be flawed, experts say that self-control can wax or wane for a number of predictable reasons.
and
> Inzlicht says that no matter what a person does, willpower is going to be a fickle commodity. It’s heavily influenced by many variables, and so it really cannot be trusted. “There are easier, less-muscular ways to engage in goal-directed behavior than relying on willpower,” he says.
Close enough for most purposes, really.
They show that willpower comes and goes for many reasons, but it is not a limited resource. You can't "use it up" in the morning, and thinking that way will lead you to actually having less willpower in the evenings even though you could have plenty!
No, but some things you do can deplete it.
For the features that I feel missing, I've been hatching this plan for my perfect app for more than a decade. "Cloud hosted HTML5? Oh, but how do I get notification on my phone? Hm, maybe need to write a native one. Not easy to develop for Android from command line, ugh. Flutter?". Rinse and repeat.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dayup.gtas...
I understand human brain's capability to forget things from a little bit of details (sometimes key details) to the "entry" itself (Don't even know that a thing is forgotten).
There are many things that should be remembered/reminded via technology, especially things that can become disasters when not done regularly (e.g. paying credit card debt, backup data, etc).
I use Todoist but you are free to choose whatever you like. Even a notes app or paper notebooks.
I think it's good to have the following features for the app/method you choose:
* Recurring Tasks (every month, every 3rd Sat)
* Task Tagging and/or categorization
* Searching (seriously what method doesn't have this except paper notebooks?)
* Sub tasks (but this depends on how you use it)
* Attachments (for small files/images)
* Commenting (extra details/logs)
Edit: Formatting
So I've kept it minimal and just use a text editor in the cloud, which is Google Docs. I can use the app on my phone while doing errands or can open it in a web browser on my laptop. The history is occasionally useful too.
But I strictly only maintain 3 documents to keep the scope limited:
- Todo Current /// items to work on this week, ordered based on priority
- Todo Future /// waiting on aspects before items can work on, reason listed
- Todo Art /// personal projects
Been using this system for years and it's been great for keeping streamlined and focused.
An iteration in a positive direction for me was switching to NotePlan.
Every day I get a fresh sheet of paper and I write my todo list as needed. If I want to bring in tasks from previous days, I can go find them and move them to today. My todos are intermingled with my notes for the day, saved links, and my journal.
This way, my list doesn't grow and grow if I don't tend to it, yet I also never lose todo items.
I can also make ad hoc todo lists on project pages, for instances.
I suppose it's quite similar to just using a notebook, except there's a view where you can see all of your todos.
Having something running around behind me taking notes and nagging to get this and that done is useful,it is only the first part of the story. What I actually want (and I suspect most others) - especially given it's been fed at least some of the information necessary - is something that helps expedite the actual tasks efficiently
This hits the nail on the head for me. I wonder if there's any to-do apps that let you ascribe effort/time to a task. Ranking current tasks by least effort would get me to start on one and get the ball rolling.
I end up using thematic periods, where I prioritize some kind of epic that feels like it matters the most. Whether I’m the ceo of a successful company or the lowly person who is part of the two people eying success in the next one I experience the same problem.
Anyone else? I can’t be alone in this.
Check: https://habinator.com
The only "feature" I want really is a diff over time just to see what I've done and what I was doing at the time. I want completion/non-completion to be represented by deletions of lines/bullet points.
Yet, I’ve since switched to the last Todo app I’ll ever use: 4” x 6” notecards.
Thinking on paper = build your mind.
Thinking in digital = build another’s.
Todos on paper = get work done.
Todos in digital = do more work.
Notes on paper = hard to create, hard to forget.
Notes in digital = easy to create, easy to forget.
I prefer to pay and still having this amazing tool than losing what I described above.
You can do the same without beeminder. The point is that having a punishment if you don't do what you said you will do is a good motivator.
1. A task is not worth doing - delete it. I am using the app so I don't have to remember it, I am not taking orders from it. 2. Not organized well - if I am cleaning the house I don't want to see what I should do for my personal finances; gift buying guides for Christmas and so on. 3. The item is important, but not something I can do something about now. This indicates to me that I should split it into smaller parts, until I have a GTD next step.
I personally think that a todolist isn't worth much unless you are also blocking time in your calendar to do that task - and when you do, that is the task you will be doing not worrying about anything else.
That said, what does give me a real sense of reward is the streak tracker for daily tasks. Seeing how many days in a row I've managed to do a task _is_ rewarding to me, but as soon as that streak is broken, I lose a lot of the motivation to maintain it (which I believe is, again, a problem predicted by this article).
Learning your routine, knowing what to do when it hears "we need more milk" or hears you arrange a hair cut, being able to make an email confirming action points from a phone call, etc., etc.
Progress on making these listening assistants be actually useful has been disappointing.
Manna – Two Views of Humanity’s Future: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
In this story, the human essentially becomes a robot, with just headphones and a "todo app" telling the human what to do every step of the way
Managing my todo list also organises my brain and lets me relax knowing I won't forget things.
Working just fine for me and I'm not sure I would want a bunch of 'smart' features being all clippy on me.
Habitica is a gamified todo that does well enough to be around for many years. Never worked for me.
* That initial "How to use it" diagram completely puts me off the product - it seems dizzyingly complex, and to have that right at the top before I even know what the product is seems like a mistake.
* Consider getting a native speaker to review the text - the grammar is off in a fair few places.
* Write a simpler paragraph for what your product does - I've read through the entire landing page, and your HN comment, and I still don't understand what it is you are selling.
I also use a Trello board for tracking longer term goals/personal projects.
with an outliner everything is a bullet point (or node). every node has an optional note section, and every node can have more nodes nested underneath it. thats basically all there is to it, but it means you can arrange things to be a basic a shopping list, or a project that holds many other sub nodes/folders, or if you were writing an article or a book you could have each node be a sort of a header/chapter description and then the content written in each note section.
ive found that rescheduling or tagging features in most todo apps just ends up being more work than actually doing the tasks themselves, so the way i organise my todo list now is by just using now/next/later nodes. i usually have a handful of tasks in the 'now' section, and maybe 10 or so in 'next'. when i run out of tasks in 'now' i move things up from next/later or if there are too many tasks in 'now' i move them to 'next'. the 'later' section is an unholy mess of things but it really doesnt matter because that section is collapsed/hidden most of the time so its not overwhelming and the search is good enough that i can pull something back up easily enough without having to organise anything or follow a system.
overall, the thing i try to remind myself is that i can only work on one thing at a time. its irrelevant whether there are 10 or 1000 tasks up next after the current one. the only thing i need to worry about right now is working on the most important task.
personally i dont get much out of marking something off the list or keeping a 'done' list. just actually completing the physical task is enough of an achievement for me.
about point #5. i would really love to see a solution to that. its the one thing that bothers me about my current setup. small tasks and chores are mixed in right beside big projects and sometimes i only want to work on one type and hide the others. the only thing i can think of its maybe filtering the list by certain words, or maybe the node content since small tasks are just usually 1 node, and projects have many sub-nodes. but its not always that simple either, so other than the only solution is to go back to tagging things.
The notes you take during the day, and past lists are all easily searchable in a text file.
(localization for weekday names coming after my vacation)
Its philosophy is built around the fact that I'm only ever going to be working on one major, todo-worthy task during a given minute. There's no reason to inundate me with dozens of things I could be working on when I'll only ever be doing one. And most of the time, I'm ambivalent to what I'm doing — if I need to consult a Todo list to remember it, clearly it's not something I'm actively working on, since I don't (yet) need help remembering those.
It's been very effective when I can use it (it needs a few tweaks so it can accept tasks from multiple sources, rather than one singular list). The core workflow is to jot down a task name and a priority in a text-based, line-delimited list file. Then, when you have time to do something, the app parses the list of tasks and selects exactly one at random, weighted by the priority. At that point, you have four options: - Defer the task and roll for a new one (which increments a counter on the task, and does not guarantee that you'll actually get a different task!) - Log some time on it, and optionally roll for a new task (again, not guaranteed to be different) - Mark it done, and roll for a new task - Exit the app
It knows about repeating tasks, start and due dates, dependency trees, and "stints", which are just a log of the time you spent on a particular task. It can filter tasks based on how much time you have to work vs. how long you estimate it will take, whether there are unsatisfied dependencies, etc. There's even an option that tries to assign you tasks that try to keep your "mood" steady. You can optionally annotate tasks with a mood tag (which is just a float), with the idea being that tasks with positive values are pleasant, and ones negative values are unpleasant. If it assigns you a mood-tagged task and you work on it, it adds the value from the tag to a global mood variable, and the default priority scheme tries to keep it around 0. In other words, when you do something pleasant, it builds up a buffer so you can handle something unpleasant. Or, if you do something unpleasant, it tries to reward you by giving you something pleasant to do.
The crown jewel is the LISP-y functional priority language that implements these dynamic tweaks to the priorities. For example, I have some rather daunting tasks that entail a lot of repetitive, monotonous work. Since it knows when I've been working on it, I can script it to de-prioritize those based on how much time I've spent on them lately.
It's technically open source (it's a TUI app written in Go), but I'm hesitant to post a link here since it's not robustly tested, the code isn't pretty, and the README is written in a sarcastic, derisive tone. I'm hoping to rewrite it after I finish up a library I'm working on to make it a bit more generally useful.
Something very satisfying about viewing the flat file