A Better To-Do List: The 1-3-5 Rule | Hacker News Reader

A Better To-Do List: The 1-3-5 Rule

thedailymuse.com

77 pointsacav30 comments

My current system is kind of strange but works for me:

- I have a "master view" of sorts in Trello where I keep track of projects/long term stuff in a birds eye view

- I use a notebook (real one non electronic) to keep track of my daily stuff

- In the notebook I write down the stuff todo every day and scribble down 25 minute checkboxes behind each one guestimating the time it takes (this is a leftover from promodoro which I dropped alas I kept some parts that I liked)

- Whenever I start on an item I highlight it with a yellow marker and cross off a checkbox after about 25 minutes...if it takes longer i add extra checkboxes as circles, triangles if it takes even longer (this is to keep track of my self estimation)

- Other than the date and todo items I have a box at the top for each day where I track long term improvement stuff i.e. silly stuff like "got out of bed within 15 minutes of the alarm ringing", "drank 1l+ of water"...I start each day by drawing that box and after a while when those items become automatic they get removed and replaced by other stuff (say "took a 10 minute walk")

I could see adding a layer of 1-3-5 when creating the daily list but it might actually be more like 1-2-3.

I used to write my tasks for the day on a single Post-It note. This limited space forced me to make deliberate choices about which tasks were most important. When I wrote longer lists in a big notebook, I rarely completed every item. Over time, I determined that the Post-It note was just the right size (depending on your handwriting). Plus I could stick my Post-It right on my monitor, never out of sight.

Carrying leftover tasks over to tomorrow's list (sometimes for multiple days) feels bad, whereas crumpling up (and recycling!) a completed Post-It note feels great. :D

I also found a good use for those old business cards from a previous job or title; they are just the right size for mini-task lists. :)

On the surface it sounds like an reasonable way to prioritize things -- every day do 1 big thing, 3 medium things, and 5 small tasks -- but why should such a division of your time necessarily reflect your priorities? What if the best use of your time at the present moment was to just focus on the single most important thing (for example)?

(Note, this is just from thinking it through in the abstract, and I know that practical experience with things can show you sides of them that weren't obvious in the abstract. So if anyone does have practical experience with it and can comment, I'd be interested to hear it).

> What if the best use of your time at the present moment was to just focus on the single most important thing?

Well, you wouldn't need a to-do list, for starters.

Just because it might be best to focus on just one thing at the present doesn't mean you don't have other things to do that you need to keep track of.

I think the rigidity of this system is its biggest drawback, as is the case with most productivity systems. For example, if I have two large projects that I need to get done and I only write down one, the other is going to keep nagging at me in the back of my head while I'm working and distract my focus. If I write both of them down, then I've deviated from the system, which in my experience means that by the end of the week, it'll just devolve into a vanilla to-do list grouped by the 'size' of tasks.

That's mainly why I switched to GTD for all of my to-do lists and projects. Because my inbox holds literally every task or to-do item that pops into my head during the day, I never have that distracting "am I forgetting something?" feeling during the day. I can process and sort my inbox whenever I have free time, and the flexibility in deciding which tasks should be made into projects, next actions, etc... means that the system always fits my schedule no matter how unpredictable or crazy it is, instead of me having to fit my schedule into the system.

So what do you use as your inbox?

I use an app called pocket informant on my phone. It's a nice all-in-one organizer that supports GTD-style tasks and syncs with my Google calendar.

If you only have two big things you need to get done, that is probably part of your problem. In that case, one of your todo's should probably be to subdivide one or both of them into smaller tasks.

One of my most effective ways of overcoming procrastination in particular is that when I don't want to do something, I force myself to at least spend two minutes splitting at least one task on my todo list into a few smaller tasks. Sooner or later I have enough really small, trivial tasks that it is easy to push through at least some of them.

Sometimes that ends up with stupid levels of details. But often it ends up revealing that part of the reason for procrastinating was that I didn't really know, but maybe had a nagging suspicion of, the level of complexity in a task...

Sometimes it's not so straightforward to split up large into many small tasks. A lot of the time these steps will depend on other unpredictable factors, which leads to a lot of backtracking and adjusting my to-do list down the road when I should be working.

I'm a fan of iteratively processing my projects, deciding just the next one or two steps every time I process my tasks. I find that if I let my to-do lists balloon in size, I have less motivation to actually clear it out. But that's just me. In the end it's all about making the right decision based on how you know your brain works.

I use my inbox as well, with heavy reliance on Boomerang to get stuff out of my sight until I'm ready to deal with it. Any other good inbox tools/hacks to recommend here?

Inspired me to make http://1-3-5.com/

Neat !

Small remark: the github link does not work (it has an extra .github.com).

Fixed :)

Wow. So simple. So effective. No login. No save button. Just works. I love it :)

Kudos to you!

I can see that this is really really simple stuff (single page client side only), but it's genuinely executed very well in terms of appearance, usability and functionality.

I think we could all learn a little something from this.

Thanks! I was also inspired from this: http://a5.gg/ Sort of the same idea; simple, elegant.. 1-3-5.com is just a GitHub page ;)

Nice, looks good on an iPhone though perhaps wastes a bit too much space on padding. NB when going from landscape back to portrait it doesn't refresh the screen properly. Also, crossing things off would be cool

Thanks, added checkbox functionality. Will look into the spacing on mobile more thoroughly.

I know there's a lot of this kind of advise out there and I find most of it works fairly well. I think that for people who have a problem getting things done, the main issue is just not having any way of tracking things at all.

I don't follow any methodology as such, but one thing which did help me was reading a tiny bit about the Pomodoro stuff. Basically the thing which absolutely kills my productivity is context switching. i.e. starting one thing, then breaking off to do another. What I take away from the Pomodoro stuff is that I should not work on anything for less than 20mins and that time should be carved up into 20min chunks.

In practice all this means to me is that I try not to get distracted by other things and if somebody attempts to get my attention I'll get them to wait until I've completed the thing which I'm at task on.

I don't do anything by strict structure, so everything's subject to changes, but I try to be careful to allocate a minimum amount of time to things and I try to make a todo list. In my private life I use toodledo, which gives me decent views by due date/urgency/context/folder. At work, I'm using a mix of Gmail stars, Gmail tasks and proprietary apps, though in the past I have just used a single .txt file.

Only thing I've found that worked for me was emails. Whatever app I want to use, I'll still get 100+ emails everyday. When I don't have that much thing to do, cool todo apps are great.. but anytime there's a real "get shit done urgently" I just fall back to email mode.. so I guessed why not always use email.

Even doing just 1 big thing per day can do miracles: http://blog.weekdone.com/top-10-ways-for-a-productive-week/

This reminds me of a blog post by Scott Hanselman where he mentioned the Rule of Three [2], which seems like a similar approach to todo lists in that it helps you narrow your focus onto the most important things you need to get done.

[1] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ProductivityVsGuiltAndSelfLoat...

[2] http://sourcesofinsight.com/the-rule-of-3/

This approach also lets you move the big thing (or hard thing) to a time when you are at your best and have few interruptions. I personally like to do the hard or more unknown bits sooner, and sometimes I even save up the easy stuff for those after-lunch hours when my brain feels mushier.

I use a diary to maintain the tasks for any day. If the tasks are not done on that day, very rarely they are done in a single day, I write them on the next day's calendar page. I also write a small note below the previous page where I get the next thread.

Try this App EisenPower - http://www.eisenpowerapp.com/

Nope, I've nothing to do with the app. I'm just a happy regular user.

This is similar to A-B-C analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#ABC_analysis

this is similar to these suggestions from the following articles

1. http://mysuperchargedlife.com/blog/personal-productivity-acc...

2. http://lifehacker.com/5853732/take-a-more-realistic-approach...

I like what this allows for daily tracking. It makes it really easy to see if you got through everything you wanted to on a daily basis.

Not a bad idea, but I don't print the templates out. Just use a scrap piece of paper. It'll save money and trees.

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