How I manage my todos, priorities and calendar | Hacker News Reader

How I manage my todos, priorities and calendar

ryanleecarson.tumblr.com

128 pointsryancarson77 comments

There are a few things I'm looking for in a task management system. Those of you who remember IWantSandy when it was still around will have a good idea of the feature set I'm looking for, plus a few things.

Haven't yet found something that ticks all of the boxes..

* Easy task entry with natural language Do thing with Dick and Jane at Location tonight at 6:30 pm and every week on thursday (Sandy was the undisputed queen of this)

* Truly cross platform (Needs a web interface, and an identical native interface on Win/Mac/Lin, and a mobile interface which isn't tied to the web)

* A CLI would be nice but isn't super necessary (ala Taskwarrior)

A couple of my favorite systems get one or two things right really, really welll but then fall flat elsewhere. I'd use Omnitask everywhere except it's completely mac specific, and therefore useless for my needs. Seriously. I would give almost anything to have Omnitask on Windows. Wunderlist isn't bad at all, but isn't terribly stable on the native client, have to enter everything the old fashioned way though. Taskwarrior is my go-to in a *NIX environment but, again, useless anywhere else.

I'm currently using Todoist, which has a decent web interface and mobile client, with semi-decent NLP task entry, and it's doing okay for me now.

I'm very, very seriously open to suggestions here. Asana looks absolutely beautiful, but it's another Mac-Web specific product, so wouldn't work for me.

I am very happy to see a Todoist user on HN! Founder of Todoist here.

Unfortunately I had I detour in social networks so the work on Todoist has been slow for some years. But about 8 months ago we started fulltime working on it and Wedoist. I think we have some amazing updates coming up that will solve all of your issues (ex. HTML5 enabled web and desktop applications and native mobile apps for iOS and Android).

Stay tuned and please provide feedback of how we can improve Todoist (here or on my email which is in my HN profile).

I'm actually very very happy with Todoist (just reread my OP and found that it made it sound like I was an unpleaseable jerkface) - really the two things that I'd give almost anything to see are a native desktop app with some kind of quick entry (Another Omnitask feature I've been spoiled by.. cmd+space, window pops up, enter details, tab, enter further details like date, enter, task is captured), and as mentioned elsewhere here, a better mobile app. I would pay by the month for something like this!

In any case, keep up what you're doing. You've got a killer app :)

Awesome, very happy to see the Todoist founder here :-)

I compared several todo web apps several years ago, and found Todoist to have the best UI -- never understood why people liked "Remember the Milk" so much.

I haven't used it (or any other todo list) much lately. I decided I need to start maintaining one again, and considered Todoist... but decided on TaskPaper (native Mac app) as it can live separately from my browser tab farm, and input/viewing is about as quick & simple as it gets.

Please just get away from your not-native Todoist app. It's slow, it's not pretty. It's the opposity of the awesome web interface. I used Todoist for a long time , but with time and the increase of my mobile usage(due to iPhone) i needed a decent iPhone app. Just make a decent, beautiful iPhone app, believe me lots of people like me will converse and move to Todoist.

(off-topic: Keep up the great work amix. I've learned lot from you programming blog).

We learned a lesson in mobile development and we are dumping our HTML5 mobile app. The experience is simply too limited and you need to do lots of hacks to make simple things work. For anybody that is thinking about going HTML5: don't do it, it's more a pain than a gain and the user experience won't be good.

We will do a public beta in the following weeks of our iOS version. We will make it public via our Twitter/G+/FB accounts, so stay tuned ;-)

Any plans for android in the foreseeable future?

One problem I have with most of these services is that they are hosted services, i.e. they have access to my data, even in principle. Therefore, I cannot use them for work information.

I'd rather have a system that saves data locally and lets me handle the hosting on the cloud.

Not that I use it, but I always thought TiddlyWiki would be good for this.

> "Do thing with Dick and Jane at Location tonight at 6:30 pm"

Isn't this an event instead of a task? At least for me tasks and events are very separate beasts. I built http://timegt.com productivity app and specifically try to keep clear that it's not becoming calendaring and events tool but focusing on tasks. But yeah, sometimes it's hard to draw a clear line.

I've never really drawn a bright line distinction between the two, choosing to treat tasks and appointments as a generic obligation that has to be prepared for and dealt with like any other task.. that's one thing that's always bugged me about traditional time management apps like Outlook's calendar.

"Isn't this an event instead of a task? "

Depends on the priority for me. If I have go meet some people just to maintain social ties and I am not really interested, it becomes a task for me because I have to make an effort. If I am interested and looking forward to it, then it is an event.

Never got to use IWantSandy, but how is it different from gmail recognizing events for you to add to your GCal, or adding Alerts? Is there something analogous today?

The big thing with Sandy was the natural language input from almost any method. You could send it emails, text messages, tweets, what have you, which would then be automatically captured. Basically you could add tasks via whatever communications method you had immediately at hand.

The take home message here is two fold.

1) build some regularity into your daily routine even if you wear different hats

2) Systemisation will set you free

People griping about specifics of management systems aren't seeing the forest for the trees.

    1) build some regularity into your daily routine [ ... ]
    2) Systemisation will set you free

Translation: transform yourself into a cron daemon that fires up at 4:54AM and sleeps at 9PM.

Easier said than done. We'd all love to just make it up as it goes. But there's aHUGE problem with that. It's fine if you're single and don't have a ton of responsibilities, but if you're a parent and a responsible to a bunch of other people in your startup who are parents too, then what Ryan has done here is nothing short of remarkable.

Call it what you will, but it sure as hell is effective and true. And if you have to sacrifice being a "rebel" or "free spirit" for anything, your kids, family & health are probably the right things to do it for.

Not to mention, he's already pretty out there for running a startup, working from home and still caring for stability and the health of his families. I know many people who work their regular 9-5's who're doing far worse & they think they're real "rebels" for hitting the bars every night or something else that's utterly stupid...

I'd gladly transform myself into a cron daemon and have the best of life, family & work that I love doing.

Thanks for the post Ryan, you're an inspiration to other Dadtreprneurs!

Funny how extreme the views here are. So I either hit the bars and get drunk every night or I run on a manic schedule?

The premisses here are entirely false. There is a balanced life in between which IMHO is where we should be aiming.

Care to expand on this view of balanced life? I thought that's what's so appealing about Ryan's post... If you've got some thoughts on how to get a better balance, that would be much appreciated, rather than simply critiquing someone else's solution (which may or may not work for everyone, but may for others)

Thanks for the kind words!

Great summary - thanks.

Thanks for the mixergy interview ;)

No prob :)

I hate to nitpick, but I can't stand this persistent meme that eating in the morning boosts your metabolism, or some such nonsense. It doesn't[1]. This idea needs to die.

1. http://www.leangains.com/2010/10/top-ten-fasting-myths-debun...

I hate to nitpick, but the "Skipping breakfast is bad and will make you fat" section of that article is terrible, as are some of the others. The skipping breakfast section doesn't actually show data either way, it's just the author expressing his interpretation of correlation studies. I'm not saying he's necessarily wrong, just that he needs to show real data to support his claims.

Also, the site's design is terrible and the font size is too small.

Here is another good read (from few days ago on HackerNews) on "How Uservoice use Trello & Google Docs to make UserVoice better every day." - http://www.uservoice.com/blog/founders/trello-google-docs-pr...

We're following this rather closely and is pretty good so far. Once you master a decent tool, you can do lots with it. So, if you're an Asana guys, go with it but then if you've started with Trello, make the best of it. You do not need to get swayed here and there trying to find the best tool ready-made for you.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3853688

Just read that post from UserVoice. Wow, very insightful. Thank you!

Totally agree. Use whatever tool works best for you.

I really enjoyed this post. I like the idea of rotating through the different responsibilities during the week (Product / Video & Teaching etc). I could see this helping make sure you don't neglect areas that maybe you are a little less passionate about - for example, maybe you like thinking about product development but not HR / Culture, having a split schedule like this makes sure you put a little time into the HR problems each week instead of waiting for some emergency to force you to concentrate on that.

Why 4:54 instead of, say, 4:55 or 5:00?

I'm sort of surprised at that - the level of detail you'd need to care about 4:54 vs 5:00 would imply that you'd have stuff like "take a shower" in the schedule somewhere.

Unless Ryan's not the showering type, which is fine. Personally I find that it freshens me up and sets a nice "start of the day" feeling. If I miss a day for whatever reason I feel icky and unkempt.

Gives me six minutes to get downstairs and in front of my iMac. The exactness helps me hustle instead of hitting the snooze button.

Just look at his picture, and you will have your answer.

I'm not seeing it.

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Sounds like a good strategy. That's the main point - having a strategy instead of running round like crazy.

Asana looks pretty interesting.

I've been using TeamworkPM for 2 years now. It has been through a lot of improvements lately, which makes it very powerfull now. It organizes client/partner companies and projects in a matrix sort of way that allows you to really flexibilize access to tools and documentation. I like it.

For my personal stuff I use a simple TXT file with markup.

E.g.

##House Maintenance //Project or recurring work

+ Clean patio //task that must be done

- Paint doors //optional task

No dates or anything. I just look at the list early in the morning and decide what I'm doing for the day.

Thanks for sharing.

Seems like Asana is getting a lot of love lately. Is it that great? I mainly use Workflowy & Trello but I'm always shopping for a better tool :)

I found Trello too complex and WorkFlowy under-supported. Asana is just the right mix. It's powerful and flexible but it gets out of your way.

Trello too complex, seriously? I had the opposite experience, I found Trello super straightforward, and so did my parents, girlfriend, friends etc, whereas Asana is not that straightforward

I just had a play with Asana, which is great in many ways.

But doesn't support a hierarchy other than Project->Task. As I frequently want to break things down into much smaller chunks and subchunks I guess I'll be sticking with Workflowy for the moment.

Shame, really. It's got a great interface.

Exactly, I replaced Asana with Workflowy for this reason.

The other showstopper for me was that Asana's mobile site is almost unusable outside of a fast wi-fi connection. Workflowy is extremely usable from a phone even when I'm in an area with weak bandwidth. So I can take notes and start planning while in a meeting and they're on my screen when I get back to my desk.

I'm intrigued - what lack of support did you find in Workflowy? I use it a lot, and never needed any support, and now I'm wondering what I'm missing!

There was a big bug with not being able to add/edit tasks once you had sorted by a hashtag. Probably fixed now, but it was a show-stopper for me.

I think they fixed that a long time ago: http://blog.workflowy.com/new-workflowy-feature-add-stuff-wh... Re: responsiveness, I've actually been very impressed by the team. I've emailed them about 3 separate product suggestions, one of which was actually pretty dumb. They got back to me in all cases very quickly and thoughtfully. It's a small team -- still just two guys, I think -- but they've been doing a great job to improve it quickly.

Asana is amazing. The product has matured to the point of excellence.

It is amazing, I agree. That said, it's an amazing product I can't use.

I need access when I'm not connected to the web, because I do most of this stuff when I'm on the Underground. It needs to sync up when I'm connected - and Asana doesn't support my phone.

It's a sign of the times - there is great (read AWESOME) and very usable tech out there these days, but it's reach is still severely limited - be that because of cost constraints, walled gardens or developer laziness, arrogance or ignorance.

So I end up writing this kind of software for myself. I end up with a tiny fraction of the features in exchange for reach.

Agreed. It's largely replacing email at Treehouse (our company).

Curious: How has Asana improved in the past 6 months?

You should give Intervals a try if you haven't already:

http://www.myintervals.com/

It's a great tool. My only complaint is -- Currently there's no way to search notes or comments inside a task.

Decent post on his workflow. Asana looks nice enough but I would always prefer to use open source or pay for a product rather than using a product that is just free. Just doesn't make sense unless they are selling your info to advertisers.

Does anyone know how/why Asana is free?

It's freemium, free for <30 users.

I registered with my Google Account to asana.com after reading the article.

The interface is nice but I want to unsubscribe now, being sure that they cannot access my account anymore.

Is there any FAQ or page in Google listing all the enabled applications ?

Thank you

You can list authorized apps and revoke authorization from Google's accounts page.

Here's the direct link: https://accounts.google.com/b/0/IssuedAuthSubTokens?hl=en

or go here: https://www.google.com/settings/ and click "Authorizing applications & sites"

thank you fps! I found the same in the dashboard ;-)

found this, and it's really annoying:

== Next, write to us and we will deactivate your account. Please note that the deactivation we perform deactivates your individual Asana account and not your shared workspaces.

We don't yet provide a single action or button to delete your Asana account as we want to safeguard against unintended deletion. ==

from: http://help.asana.com/customer/portal/articles/204659-how-do...

found the Google page, not that easy

if anyone needs: https://www.google.com/dashboard click on "Websites authorised to access the account"

In your account settings (https://www.google.com/settings/), next to "Authorising applications & sites" there's an Edit link.

Ryan - how do you conduct meetings with the people you need to during the week? Is it via Skype or chat?

Also, what are the challenges of managing others via distance?

Lastly, how do you compare Asana with Basecamp?

And yet, this makes way more sense to me: http://zenhabits.net/how-to-live-without-the-clock/

Asana doesn't look anywhere near as good as Wunderlist.

    Here’s my daily routine
    Wake up at 4:54am [ ... ]
    Jump in front of my iMac

IMO if you wake up before 5 AM and jump in front of your iMac then there's either something wrong with your to-do list program or with your to-do list itself.

First hitting his iMac at 4:54am but also finishing work at 6pm with time in-between for his kids before school, the gym, and then finishing at 6pm. And...a four day week. I'd say he's got it figured out.

That only works as long as everything works. Soon as you car breaks down coming back from the gym, soon as your kid has a flu and you've got to take him to the hospital and come back at 2 AM, everything has broken down. Then the next day you can't remain on 9pm to 4am sleep anymore, you're then catching up with the late stuff from day before. Weekends then become compensation for the day before the day before when you had the kid flu and then ....well I've been there, done that, and this kind of schedule simply does not work(for me).

I know many people who I presume like you, let chaos and drama rule their lives.

Shit happens, it doesn't matter if you have a super-structured day or not. Your ability to handle it calmly and with confidence is what makes the difference in how balanced, productive and stress-free your life is.

    I know many people who I presume like you, let chaos and drama rule their lives.

So you either wake up at 4:54 AM or you let "chaos and drama" rule your life? Aren't we missing some possibilities in between?

    balanced, productive and stress-free your life is.

Yes, because waking up at 4 AM and working till 6 PM sure sounds balanced, productive and stress-free. Thanks for the amazing insight.

If you simply regard this as the prototype for a typical day, and not a script that's intended to handle all possible atypical scenarios, then there is no problem for it. As to 4am - 6pm, it's not like he's working solid in that timeframe. He's got personal time (kids, gym, etc) worked in there as well.

All of that is beside the point, however, as this is the schedule that works for HIM. If it doesn't work for you (or if structured schedules in general do not work for you) then you are quite free to simply move along.

So, how is that different than any schedule? If you're working on a 24-hour schedule, obviously interruptions can screw things up. It sounds like he's getting plenty of sleep, so it would probably be okay to sleep an hour less every so often. He probably also has plenty of time on the weekend to reset to his desired schedule if interruptions during the week caused his schedule to shift. I'm wondering what sort of magical schedule would fix the supposed problems you've proposed.

I'm a morning person. Plus this allows me to work around my kid's schedule and have more time with them when they're awake

What if your kids catch a flu?

What if your car breaks down?

What if a friend has a broken car two blocks from your house and calls you and asks for help?

These types of tight schedules where everything is machinized and controlled don't work in real life unless you become a robot - in that case you've defeated your purpose.

Sleep at 9, wake at 5 is not realistic unless you're training for IronMan triathlon.

These types of schedules break down because things break down: family has issues, cars break, flu happens, roofs get infiltrations, pipes leak, electricity fails, planes get late, airports are crowded, streets may jam, etc, etc...

You part on the principle that everything just works and you can sleep at 9 and wake at 4, that is simply unreal.

You seem to be assuming that he doesn't adapt to circumstances. I have a similarly constrained schedule, and yet when things come up I adapt to them. Having the schedule means that I don't have to adapt very often, and under normal circumstances I can concentrate on the job, and not on scheduling the job.

You're replying as if the man is an unthinking robot, enslaved by the schedule, but it's clear to me that he's not. He's simply automated what he can to free up time from scheduling, and to make sure important things are scheduled in properly as the norm.

Interestingly, I have found this varies by region.

The major employer in my area (that I work at) has 15,000 people. The unions (factory workers and draftsmen) have to show up between 6am and 7am depending on their specific project (everyone has an exact time, and can actually be 'late').

Engineers can show up anytime they want and leave whenever they want, but typically 9-3 is encouraged as 'core hours' so there is overlap, but other than that we can set our schedules. Thus, I come in at 9am on most days. Most engineers come in more like 7:30-8am.

Because the main employer sets the tone, a lot of other companies in the area run an earlier pace. My girlfriend works at a completely unrelated company and started work before 8am. Most of the schools start very early (because the parents are probably out of the house really early). All the union guys are leaving work at 2:30 or 4 in the afternoon, so restaurents open early and close early.

Coming from an NYC office where 10am-6pm was the norm, 6:00am-2:30pm seems strange. But it does have some advantages.

First off, did you know the sun comes up EARLY. Holy crap was I missing a lot of daylight on the 10-6 schedule. I was up at 5:30 this morning and it was basically broad daylight out there. I went surfing before and after work yesterday while also putting in 9 hours at the office. That only happens if you wake up at 5 in the morning.

I personally like to maximize my outdoors-in-the-sun time so getting up at 530 in the summer and 6-630 in the winter has been a revelation. Yes, you have to go to bed earlier. But my girlfriend and I ditched the habit of watching TV before bed we both had from college (and don't have a TV in the bedroom) and that helps a lot. It also helps to go to the gym right after work.

But consider he goes to sleep at 9:30pm. Shift it to your bedtime:

10:30pm -> Up at 6am

11:30pm -> Up at 7am

12:30am -> Up at 8am

Exactly. Too much narrow focus on the fear of waking up before 5am.

I'm on something akin to the 11:30pm -> Up at 7am schedule and most days I’m too tired to even make it to 11:30pm. It's a very good thing.

He said he go to bed at 9, it's just a schedule shift.

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