Ask HN: What low-tech way do you use to manage competing tasks/to-dos | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What low-tech way do you use to manage competing tasks/to-dos

1 pointlock-the-spock5 comments

I am in a work environment with a very wide range of tasks, some quick, some easy, some coordination, some contribution, some urgent, some long-term but important. All these involve a different cast of characters, teams and validation chains.

I am very well able to handle 'urgent' tasks with the typical email-is-my-todo method, but i struggle to get a handle on all the larger and more long-term tasks. I also cannot add own software to the device or use external services as the work is often sensitive.

I tried GTD and various other methods or apps but they are usually either too complex and rely on consistency (like gtd) or assume that tasks are more or less uniform in style (like most to do list approaches).

What methods based on either paper, typical office tools (outlook, OneNote) or that are tool agnostic have you found to work for handling your day to day while staying sane?

I have a remarkable tablet (e-ink device), on which I handwrite todo's in a specific file. That file is synced to my computer, on which it gets translated to text and exported to an org-mode file and parsed into my org-agenda. I can then view/complete/index my TODO's both digitially on my laptop/phone, or analogue on my tablet

Not really low-tech, but a lot more physical than pure GTD

May I ask what device? But the setup sounds quite complex, I'm not sure i would consider this low tech :-)

Device is a remarkable2, its synced via https://github.com/ddvk/rmfakecloud, and handwritting recognition / org-export using tesseract and a small rust wrapper

Definitely not low-tech, but I just can't go back to paper. Its nice being able to search up what were your todo's on a certain date and keep digital track of what you missed :)

Time blocking with pen and paper. Simple, fast and has revision history built in.

- Start with your fixed time commitments: meetings, commute, lunch etc.

- Then it's a matter of balancing the quicker tasks with the "meatier" project work.

- I'll usually have two blocks for faster tasks, email backlogs etc.

- Then you look at your project list and allocate as much time as you can to these bigger things.

Once you've drawn up your day, you follow it like a calendar.

Things will inevitably change during the day: some things take longer than you planned, urgent things pop up. The beauty here is that you then have to redraw the rest of the day's blocks, so you're forced to make a conscious decision on what gets cut.

I got this from Cal Newport's book "Deep Work", which I highly recommend, but you can also read about the method in this short blog post he wrote

https://calnewport.com/deep-habits-the-importance-of-plannin...

Sublime Text. Nothing is faster and low footprint to track projects and meetings than plain text in sublime. Separate text file per project. One each for recurring meetings (e.g. team meetings, 1-on-1s, etc). It’s my personal knowledge base and record.

Outlook. for screenshots. Sometimes I email myself to keep a record of things. Also for small attachments.

Keynote NF (Windows only) just for the hierarchy. Only for light todos. Nothing more goes in. Delete nodes few days after done. Visual hierarchy is very useful. Never go beyond 2 levels.

Printer paper (standard US Letter) folded in half. I keep 3-4 under my keyboard for immediate tasks and diagrams.

More than tools, its how I use them.

All my text files have the name YYMMM-topic.txt. Super easy to find visually. YYMMM is date when I created that file. I put a date around any new topic. Sometimes a few days later.

Headers

—---------

to draw my attention.

[ ] Checklists

[ ] for pending tasks

[ ] at the top of the text file.

I find a tree with dragable nodes (in Keynote NF) useful for todos. Much better than a lists.

Never use styles (bold, underline, etc). They will get destroyed moving between systems and good editors are bulky.

Stopped giving a damn about backups or cross device syncing. I just copy and paste text fiiles every few days. Emails are backed up by corporate. Don’t care about todos. Paper gets dumped into a box. File useful stuff into a folder when it gets full.

On paper, I just draw small connected graphs. Each page has 3-5 big letter words, circled. Smaller text surrounding each topic. Never more than 30 words per page. Use it mostly when I am learning something new. Or brainstorming.

I take pictures of these on my phone if I want to think more.

Finally, I use Google Docs for personal stuff. Same luddite principles apply. Except I love how I can create headers in each doc and have a table of contents generated.

Thats it.

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