How my todo list works
antirez.com
antirez.com
The main thing for my productivity has been figuring out what I want and don't want in life. That's a big rabbit-hole; to do it properly you need multiple Phd's in psychology, it feels like sometimes. Much easier to just dick around with this or the other Getting-Widgets-Cranked app.
Once you know what you want and don't want, everything becomes much easier. Don't fall into the trap of procrastiplanning, is what I'm saying.
For the most part, it doesn't matter what tools you use if you (1) have developed discipline, and (2) have actually defined what you want to accomplish.
The key hill to climb, where most would-bes are going to fail is at this sentence: "READ THE DAILY LIST EVERY DAY once you sit in front of the computer".
To do that, you've first got to develop the will and desire to accomplish stuff -- and if you had that, you probably wouldn't be fiddling around with the todo-method-du-jour.
Of course, not all are succesfull at that ;)
Right now I need to remind myself to make a blogpost about isospin, make an appointment, look into a trip abroad and settle a money issue. I can't do all of this now and if I did one of these things I would have to take care to not forget the others.
How could I remember that without a good old paper and a pen?
One productivity product that I did like: The time of your life, by Tony Robbins. But it's very different from GTD type stuff, as it focuses more on figuring out what you want and thinking up smarter ways to achieve the goals. Ie it focuses on desired emotional outcomes rather than specific todos.
I find this one of the best features of a paper system. Every time you copy it over, you reevaluate your items.
For me, at least, the act of list-making is more beneficial than the list itself.
Right now I have two lists, a "hopper" list where all goals go - it gets filled at the start with everything I want to accomplish that week - and a "do today" list which is populated from the hopper and organized the night before each coming day. Technique stolen from someone here on HN. Simpler seems to work better for me, even though my days are jam packed with multiple clients/projects/etc; I have tried all the notes apps and the complexity adds extra work, time and mental effort that is not worth it in my opinion. I keep my 2 todo lists in a memo on my phone and that's all there is to it.
One of the most useful 'todo system' concepts I have encountered is the notion of 'hiding' a todo item (i.e. keeping it from distracting me) until it is relevant [idea from http://bitliteracy.com/, a book by Mark Hurst]. For instance, I shouldn't need to see anything about filing taxes on my todo list every single day of the year—this shouldn't show up until the relevant time. The OP's method addresses this with the 'weekly' and 'monthly' lists that are read less frequently, allowing reminders to become daily only when they are relevant. The system Mark Hurst designed (http://goodtodo.com) instead allows you to specify a sort of 'start date' for a todo item, and it won't show up until that date. I have found this idea, however implemented, to be very useful in allowing me to get things out of my head and into an organized system, but not let them distract me until relevant.
[Full disclaimer: I have no connection with Mark Hurst other than having read the book linked above and attended one of his talks.]
I like backpack because I can reorder and drag items between lists easily. There is even a checkbox beside each item, which I get an unreasonable amount of satisfaction by clicking.
Yeah! Weird, but I get this too! What is it that makes it feel so strange on OS X?
But yeah, a text file on Dropbox is my favorite solution.
Edit: I do actually use and like todo.txt, myself. Worth getting to know.
The general todo list is for things not fitted in the current version. Its items can be done in parallel to the current release list or moved into the next version list.
The Emacs org mode is just a plain text file and make it very easy to organize the todo list.
One gripe I have is that it's a little hard to go back and look at what you've done over the years, at least with the way I do it: I have a To Do (Planned), To Do (This Week), Doing (Today), Done (Week yyyy-mm-dd). I archive the Done list for the week at the start of the next week.
Pulling up done lists for the last few weeks has been ok, but I'm not sure if this solution will scale well.
One thing I've found convenient for my high priority to-do card is a script that prints it on to my desktop. Trello already has a fairly solid API.
In my opinion the biggest challenge for to-do solutions is how to stay in the users face all the time. Which is probably why sticky notes on the monitor are still popular.
I discovered taskwarrior [1] and fell in love. So far it's blissfully simple. No syncing (I guess I could easily tack it on though), but I'm on that machine anyway, always (irc, mail, tinkering).
So far it's the most natural interface that I could imagine.
a) It's extremely hard to make todo list app that accommodates all workflows that people want well. For example, RTM is not that well suited for GTD, but wouldn't you expect each of the most popular to-do list app to be well suited, for, you know, the most popular todo-ing method?
b) Sometimes manual steps are the point - rewriting list actually gives you time to review the items, so some people opt out for paper and such. I usually use RTM, but, for example, one-off packing lists I do on paper.