Inbox, diary, to-do list: now choose just two
realreturns.blog
realreturns.blog
- Calendars are good at appointments but bad at everything else.
- Day planners are good for jotting down what you're working on and for revisiting what you did last week/month, but if you put anything with a deadline in your day planner you're bound to forget it. And if you have a ton of notes that relate to a single project, where do you put them?
- To-do lists tend to accumulate tasks and then you declare TODO bankruptcy, delete everything, and start over.
I'm convinced it's possible to merge these concepts intelligently, in a way that hasn't been done before. An app that has a free-form day planner, but you can still tag items with a due date, tags, etc so you can still see which deadlines are approaching.
You want to be able to zoom-in and zoom-out in your "tree" so you can do high level planning but you also want to be able to indent and add as many notes/ideas as you want without losing track of the bigger picture. With real-time multiuser editing and end-to-end encryption. That's what we're building with https://www.thymer.com
I've tried it a few times but it doesn't work for me because of your third point. I can't maintain a TODO list and I've always had mine grow too big. I end up having to drag 5-10 things to the next day every day after a month or so. I know it's because I'm horrible at prioritization and I do best when given a list of crap to do and can pick and choose what I feel like doing when I feel like doing it.
I use a big whiteboard calendar for my most important deadlines, bills, and appointments. I use a calendar app for recurring events. Then I use Obsidian to dump thoughts, lists, any random crap I think of that I can search through.
I used to have this same problem. My solution is to push items into the future if it's clear I'm not going to be able to get to them the next day. Sort of like GTD's tickler file. As long as your todo list tool allows you to add dates, you can view only items due today. That's made having a large list of tasks much easier to manage, because I only see what I have to work on today.
* not actually important if you’ve been putting them off for a month * insanely important but complicated things that need to be broken down into smaller tasks * important things with a lot of emotional baggage attached; either hand these off to someone who will not have that, or make time to unpack that baggage - unpacking it is usually the harder option and likely to become its own constantly-deferred to-do.
Always happy to see more attempts at solving this problem.
I guess I need to try logseq again - it really did have a lot of promise to be the cross-platform org-mode you mention.
The MYN methodology comes pretty close to that for me: https://www.michaellinenberger.com/AboutMYN.html
(Don’t be put off by the marketing angle and the terminology, it’s still the best personal work task management methodology I’ve come across.)
HN seems more highly populated with loggers and trackers compared to the general public. A quick search on Amazon US for "day planner", "journal", and "diary" suggests most people associate journal and diary with free-form pages and day planner with date-based pages (implying most people who use date-based pages are more planners than loggers)
Why not integrate these systems into 1 lightweight interface and make it collaborative and integrated? I'm trying to scratch my own itch with building https://acreom.com.
It’s so liberating not to have a mountain of tasks that I’ll never get to and instead enjoy time creating a visual space for things I care about.
I will try not to get too philosophical by first getting “work productivity” out of the equation. You must have tools for work productivity and maybe that’s the focus of OP.
There is the concept of “life productivity” which involves your personal projects, hobbies, your life plans, family, etc.
These are goals and aspirations which are deeply connected to your fulfillment. You can’t really put these in buckets of tasks. In fact, the mere notion of doing so sets you up for failure in many cases.
Imagine getting out of work where you look at a wall of todos to complete just to look at another. It’s exhausting and uninspiring.
By rejecting that concept and instead focusing on inspiration, curation with some level of organization and mapping you are building something something that more closely resembles your priorities and that continues to make you feel proud and happy about your past, present, and future accomplishments.
Happy to chat more about this if you’d like.
Does anyone know what planners have a layout like that?
I'm in a client facing role, so my calendar ("diary") is busy. I couldn't give that up.
Obviously my inbox exists, and some things get handled straight out of there without ever hitting my inbox or my notes/todos.
Planning and executing specific tasks/deliverables is all handled in OrgMode, which is God's own to-do list.