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Comment by BeFlatXIII | Hacker News Reader

I _had_ a trusted system way back in high school: my daily planbooks. However, when I tried getting back into the habit, I routinely find the problem of brain dumping all the open loops, then setting the book aside and forgetting to look at it for two weeks.

Part of the problem, I believe, is the nature of deadlines I handle as an adult compared to as a student. As a student, the majority of my assignments were due within a week (if not due tomorrow), so it was easy to track that everything was finished. As an adult, everything is either due by EoD (and therefore has no need of being entered in the system) or due six weeks out (I never did develop the work ethic to beat procrastination, even as an A student).

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>I routinely find the problem of brain dumping all the open loops

set a time limit, i create cards on a kanban board, write a subject and dump my task list for either a minute or until i notice myself shifting thoughts.

>setting the book aside and forgetting to look at it for two weeks

then you realize, dump a card reminding you to look at it again in less than 2 weeks. keep a metric on how often you look and reward yourself when you improve your metric. the real magic comes when you're sitting around not doing anything and you look at that todo list... and then work on it

I have found your git activity tracker is a good at-a-glance method of determining your procrastination levels

Even worse as an adult I have bunch of stuff in the back of my head that are “I should do it” but as an adult I can ignore or postpone indefinitely.

Like getting my last wisdom tooth removed. I know I have to do it but now for last 4 years I am “getting myself to do it”.

It is open loop but to close it I have to go through the procedure. Downside is - there is never really good time for it.

Not much reason for most people to get them removed anyway.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1963310/

The tasks whose only deadline is when you leave the body, I can't believe I forgot those in my OP.

In reality, most of these would not be problems, but they still occupy headspace and linger at the back of my mind.

Another part of Getting Things Done is to have a weekly review. Look at all the open projects in your trusted system and make sure you know the next thing you need to do for them. Look at your calendar and figure out what else you need to do. Think through the areas of your life and figure out what projects are in your head but not in your system.

There is a bit more to Getting Things Done than just to do lists.

> I routinely find the problem of brain dumping all the open loops, then setting the book aside and forgetting to look at it for two weeks.

Even as a student I had this problem. My solution was to write on sticky notes and put them on the wall directly next to my desk. I could no longer forget about them, and could easily remove each one as I completed it.

I ought to try this for medium and long-term projects—things that would fall beyond the one week/month I can see in a typical planner.

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