Hacker News Reader

> Checklists to pack for vacation.

A thousand times yes. Here's an older version of mine: https://honeypot.net/2023/01/13/my-travel-project.html

While I'm on vacation, I make notes about things I've forgotten. Near the bottom of that list is a reminder to add those notes to the template so I'll do them the next time I travel.

My wife thinks I'm nuts. OTOH, I'm so much more relaxed before we depart because I know that I have everything I'll need for a fun, comfortable trip. And if I don't, it's going to be some relatively minor long-tail thing that's never come up before, not something basic like "pack underwear".

For your 'Dopp kit' - do you have duplicates for things that you use on a daily (or more frequent) basis? e.g. Toothbruth, hair gel

While I follow this approach generally pre-travel, I find that on occasion I can end up taking the 'regulars' out of my travel kit for use and absentmindedly place them back in their 'normal' locations when using them as part of my regular routine.

Not completely. I buy little travel toothpastes that inevitably aren’t the one I like using. I use a hot brush and soap for shaving with a safety razor at home, but pack a little travel shave cream and disposable razor for the road.

When it’s packing time, I treat that travel kit part as its own separate list and validate that each item is still in there, or temporarily borrow it from my normal setup. It’s also one of the first things I unpack when I get home so that I can brush my teeth that night.

Cheat code: it's not illegal to rinse out the little toothpaste tubes and fill it with your favorite brand! :-P

I have found that a tech organizer bag/pouch works great for dopp kit. It is stocked and ready to go basically all the time, with duplicates or near-discards (or specialty travel sized things).

I go even a step farther and some unique items I store in the travel kit. Not sexy, but my manual (rotating) nose-hair trimmer is small and lives in that travel kit b/c at least it has a home for when I need it, and doubles that I'd have it "just in case" when traveling.

Small tweezers, a flat nail file, small nail clippers, little comb, tide pen, folding travel toothbrush, extra tray of razor blades (in a zip-loc bag), sliver of bar shampoo (also in that ziploc bag), some hair-care products that I've transferred into tiny plastic screwtop containers from Daiso (search for "5 gram cosmetic containers"), a refillable travel perfume atomizer, etc. etc. etc.

Cork Puller (two thin strips of metal that slide down the edges of a cork) since that usually doesn't draw the ire of TSA, little round hair brush that folds up and has a sewing/button repair kit built into it. Also: some minimal medicines! Tylenol, Benadryl (runny nose), couple blister packs of DayQuil/NyQuil, anything that'll hold me over until I can walk/taxi to a convenience store.

All that stuff is in a little pouch that I keep next to my socks (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017SKRWL4 - bagsmart electronics travel organizer case). Grab 5 socks, 5 underwear, that pouch, into a packing cube and I'm 99% ready to go. Worst case: buy shirts and pants at your destination, but brush, shave, groom, bathe are all taken care of.

Wow. I independently came up with something almost identical for identical reasons, including the checklists for months out, weeks out, day before, etc. It was mostly a coping mechanism for ADHD - before I did this I would reliably forget to do at least some of the things on my list or do them too late and become massively stressed as a result.

I also have job interview checklists, beginning / ending job checklists, repetitive admin checklists (beginning/end of month, beginning end of year, beginning/end of financial year etc...).

For all of these the checklist template is something I edit after one of these events after thinking "man, I wish I'd thought to do X" or "I wish Id thought of doing X a bit earlier than I did".

That’s exactly how I ended up doing this. Otherwise I’d be all stressed that my excitement-addled brain was forgetting something, which it inevitably was. Now I have more concrete work to do before a trip, but it’s easier and far less stressful.

OMG. I showed my friends the wiki I made for a recent job hunt with details about every job, every person I talked to, a status page for “initial contact”/“recruiter screen”/“tech screw”/… etc companies, and a timeline of events. Some responded in horror. Others started taking notes. I’ve never been a PM, but I PMed the “get a job” to the extreme.

My wife uses tabs on a google sheet for packing lists. Different destinations and trips have different needs. But starting with history, and editing is much more reliable.

Then a post-review for things not used, things missed, etc.

> Checklists to pack for vacation

I often have to travel for work. Sometimes I have a fair bit of notice in advance and sometimes I don't. In either case, checklists are super handy for me. I generally use either Apple Notes or Obsidian for these (previously Emacs org-mode but it's less convenient for the "add an item from your phone" case than the other options).

For the "notice in advance" case, I'll start a packing checklist pretty much the moment I know I have to travel and I'll immediately write down just a sentence or two about the purpose/objective of the trip and add any special things I might need (e.g. a Saleae logic analyzer for debugging or a GoPro for documenting). As things get discussed and the trip gets closer I'll keep adding things to the list.

For the "not much advanced notice" case, I'll look back at previous checklists to find one that has a similar objective and basically just copy it wholesale and tweak. Super super useful keeping those old checklists around, even if they're only 80% correct for the next trip.

checklists do wonders for my anxiety.

too often i'll have a sudden thought about "oh, i need to make sure to fix X" or "I cant forget to pack Y before the trip". My options to deal with those sudden thoughts are:

1. Do it immediately, which isn't always possible

2. Do it later, which means that I'll obsessively stress out about it because "what if I forget to do it? I need to make sure this stays at the forefront of my mind at all times."

3. Put it on a checklist and give myself permission to stop thinking about it until its time to do it

"The mind is for having ideas, not holding them." -- David Allen, author of Getting Things Done.

This is one of the key concepts of "Getting Things Done". Getting tasks and information out of your head so you can actually focus on what you want to accomplish or need to do. GTD has a lot more to it, but this is around 80-90% of it with the rest being implementation details. When you get the idea, as you have, you can start reflecting and trialing different systems to see what specifically works for you and in what contexts.

This is a very-HN way of describing it, but one way I conceptualize my list-making is memoization/function caching.

My brain already went through the hard work of figuring out what to do, so I should cache that result in the todo list. later I can do a quick O(1) lookup of what do and use all of my focus on doing that.

A massive plus one to that. Being "detail oriented" to me is a of knowing "what needs to be done" and "how can I sort it out". Checklists excel at it.

Also kinda related, but I'm a huge fan of the "getting things done"[0] philosophy. Putting things down on a list, helps ease so much of the anxiety about not knowing, planning the next item, and most of all, relieving the cognitive burden of having to remember, which most humans aren't built for. There's a (personal and individual) limit to how many tokens our wet neural networks can hold, and I'd rather use them to focus on the task, rather than having to remember the task from memory.

Get that on repeat mode, and boom, you have checklists!

My wife and friends are at times annoyed by how anal I am about pulling out my phone to note things down whenever a new thought or task appears for me, but I wouldn't change anything about that. So much so, my task manager app is the only one app on my phone and computer that I have a subscription for (other than news and entertainment stuff).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done

checklists for AI to track its state has been killer for getting the LLM to work through a process from end to end.

ive never considered using emojis as the checkboxes to compare between not done, in process, done, or failed though.

I often use a checklist version for travel packing, where every item simply goes after each other with a checkbox, instead of usual checklist with every new item going on new line.