Comment by submeta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by submeta | Hacker News Reader

(Todo)Lists are a very useful tool, when used effectively. They need to be accompanied by a list of principles though. Here are a few:

- Review them regularly to keep them current. Pull out your lists whenever you have the time. Add new subtasks, check off done tasks, reorg lists if necessary. Keep your lists alive.

- Focus on the most valuable tasks first. One hint for what is important: Do the tasks you avoid most.

- Block chunks of time for uninterrupted work.

- Don‘t try to do too many tasks on one day. Don‘t overschedule.

It does not matter which tools you use. Emacs+Orgmode, Things3, OmniFocus (my fav), TaskPaper, etc. Just choose one tool and stick with it. Don‘t think the grass is greener on the other side. Don‘t switch systems constantly when your current system seems overwhelming. It will be overwhelming when you didn’t keep it current. Just review and reorg your system regularly and keep it alive.

Edit: Forgot the most important principle: Don’t think that you can accomplish all the things that are on your lists. In life you are constantly forced to decide what to pick up and what to give up. Constant trade-offs. Never think that all the things on your lists should be done either. The hardest part is to realize that on a meta level you can change structures that create tasks that shouldn’t be done at all, at least not by you. This meta analysis is the hardest part. Looking at all the commitments you silently make, the roles you accepted silently now generating tons of work you shouldn’t be doing.

> One hint for what is important: Do the tasks you avoid most

There's a recently re-posted link to PG's Procrastination article[1], which argues against this:

> That's the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. They're type-C procrastinators: they put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff.

It all boils down as to why you avoid those tasks. Is it because you don't care about them, or because you dread their difficulty? If it's the former, maybe (it depends!) you can keep putting them off.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

I've just been working on this with my add coach, the challenge is to be objective. I had some tasks pop up amd I wanted to take them on rather than work the thing I'd been putting off. But to work on the motivation for tasks I think about the payoffs for completion and why they are important and realized the thing I was putting off in this case (retrofitting a yucky code base with a slick mew interface, but not fixing any debt) was actually less important than the popup which had a short timeline and high visibility with a customer. So "do what you don't want to" doesn't always work, and there is no substitute for thinking it through.

To-do lists are useful to an extent, but I’ve found making things time-bound to be the way to go. I wrote an article about this a couple of years back and I’m still using this approach with slight modifications along with a weekly planning session on Sundays: https://www.lostbookofsales.com/why-to-do-lists-often-stink-...

You’re right: We have limited time. Is a calendar necessary to consider that?

The way I see a calendar is for events that must happen at a specific time (appointments, birthdays, classes, etc.). To-dos may happen at any time. For example, I workout after lunch. But I don’t always eat lunch at the same time for the same duration. My workout may happen at 1pm or 3pm. Why do I need to schedule it at a fixed time?

Instead of scheduling todos, we could just timeblock them, and only allot N hours per day to tasks.

Absolutely, I work with blocks that only vaguely direct me with working on things I need to. With iOS calendar on Mac and phone it’s also easy to flip things around as you go.

I just have an X amount of time in my week outside of my varying weekly study schedule so I plug things in and allocate with a lot of buffers in-between to not be too tight.

It’s important to not be too harsh on yourself if you didn’t manage to do something. Just move it over to next week free block and re-adjust it on your next planning session on Sunday.

If it is something extra important with a deadline, mark it with a couple of exclamation marks. You can then at the end of week also review your progress with your longer-term goals. Voila! Works!

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