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Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?

574 points by mezod ↗ HN
I keep categorizing ideas that I really want to execute into groups like work, personal life, projects etc, and then try to allocate time to them. But even when I try to focus and narrow the list of things I want to do, life still gets in between. So how do you go about it?

In the end I spend more time reorganizing my ideas than working on them >.<

290 comments

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D4RKH0R53
I was in the same situation from the last 7-8 year, I read so many self-help books, watched countless motivational videos and other activities to stop procrastination. And the most important thing which I learned is 'Focus in one thing at a time' I will recommend you to read this https://www.briantracy.com/blog/time-management/the-truth-ab...

Hope it will help you...

numike
I use index cards and pen/pencil. i keep them around me car/home etc and I write ideas, to do list, whatever on them and as I finish/archive what I wrote on the card I toss it away. Please note I am an old person
osrec
I dog food the project management module of an app we built (it's a glorified list with time and completion tracking) - https://usebx.com/app
organsnyder
I've come to terms with the fact that I'm never going to have enough time in life to do everything I want to do. And I'm okay with that—I always have something on the list that I feel is worth doing, so it's hard to lose a sense of purpose.

When I'm overwhelmed with must-dos (rather than just want-to-dos), I try to remind myself that I just need to be doing something. It might not be the perfectly optimal thing to be doing at that particular time (though often it is), but it is indisputably better than paralysis.

ivanmaeder
"It might not be the perfectly optimal…"

Indeed.

I recently discovered Pomodoro helps me stop worrying about doing the most optimal thing: it gives me an "excuse" to just do one thing for 25 minutes at a time. What's the harm!

An interesting side effect of doing something/anything is that soon enough the real priorities become clearer.

davidscolgan
I had an epiphany of sorts about this when working on a freelance project with a client who was particularly organized. They had a kanban board split up into Inbox (ideas and incoming features and bugs), Backlog (accepted tasks), In Progress (doing right now), Review (for others to look at), and Complete columns.

At the beginning of a sprint, the project manager sat down for about 10 minutes and looked at all the cards in the inbox and decided if any should be moved to the backlog. He then rearranged the cards from most to least important.

This prevented the need to think at all when working on the project - I just took the top card from the backlog and put it into in progress until it was done.

I realized, why don't I do this for my own projects too? Since my own projects aren't paid, I for some reason think they should just be able to be done without organization. I've implemented this same system in Trello for arbitrary projects and it seems to work well when I use it. Also nice that it makes it easy to collaborate if relevant but that isn't required.

It's a hard problem though - figuring out how to "Just Get Things DoneTM" is a skill that requires trial and error to figure out what you'll actually stick to, but in some ways is the most important thing to figure out.

I also highly recommend the book The One Thing - my coach recommended it to me and though it started a little fluffy the second and third sections were solid. In short, doing less helps a lot.

The Twelve Week Year is another book with some good ideas - instead of planning long into the future, plan only on a quarterly basis, and have that quarter align with your grand vision for the future.

Happy to chat more about this, as it's a problem I've wrasseled with a lot too as a self-employed freelancer. My email's in my profile.

davidscolgan
Another thought I once realized - I think early on in my career I heard about Agile and thought it meant "not planning at all". This seems to _not_ be true at all but I think it made me subtly opposed to planning. I now see that it is more about shorter iterations, and The Twelve Week Year talks a lot about effective "just in time" planning, on a day, week, and quarterly basis.
mezod
Thanks for this David.

Funnily, 5 years ago I developed my own personal kanban tool. It's still running on http://multikanban.com Of course Trello is a thousand times more powerful and polished. I was just sharing to show that I had my "personal kanban" phase in the past. It worked for some time... but for some reason I stopped really benefiting from it. The idea was to have multiple kanban boards easily accessible, where each board would be a project. "Todos", "Money", "Family", "Refurbish motorcycle", "Code projext X", etc. Of course it worked nicely for specific projects since it helps you be very critical about what gets done and what doesn't. But I think the problem I experienced there is that basically I ended up working on a single project, two at best. Like they were top priority and they never got finished, so I missed on everything else. I still have this problem now, that's why I try something different like having specific times of the day/week allocated to "main project", "sideproject", "money", etc. I just feel that the more thought I put into it, the more complex the system becomes, the less likely is it for me to follow it through.

I did https://everyday.app to sort of define a schedule of habits I want to follow through every day, and so I feel progress in all directions I want to work on.

Thanks for the book recommendations :)

davidscolgan
I very much identify with the struggle of lots of different projects. Another thing that's helped me recently is to make it "impossible not to" do the thing I want to do. I managed to solve my exercise problem by hiring a personal trainer. Now I lose $80 if I don't go to the gym at a specific time on Monday and Friday. I've not missed a day in months. I've wondered if with certain ways of arranging my environment if working on projects could be similarly solved in that they require no motivation or willpower because there's no other option.

Cheers, and thanks for posting this question. Just writing out some of my ideas here is helpful since I'm certainly working on this right now too.

gomangogo
The best way to sustain everyday.app is by making it open source and use cloudstorage (with encryption) to sync it. You don't need to make people paying $12. Great app.
mezod
Do you have any experience monetizing open source projects? Like, server costs are definitely the most negligible of all costs of running a project!
gomangogo
I am assuming that you are doing something for the community and that you will definitely get contributors. The project can have more impact if so. Look at this open-source app to have an idea of what kind of project I am talking about : https://github.com/laurent22/joplin
czbond
I disagree. I signed up for the free initial plan of "everyday" yesterday (before seeing this thread - actually one from indiehackers). Yes, I could do something in Excel spreadsheets - but $12 is more than useful.
gomangogo
The thing is that you don't have control over your data, but everyday.app owner do !
taurath
Second the ideas of a 12 week year - I find a lot of my “really want to do” ends up being a “this year” thing, which ends up becoming a “next year” thing. If you are not likely to work on something in the next 12 weeks, for me at least it should be on a long term list and not expected to be done at all.
j45
A personal / small project Kanban is useful. When I'm doing well with it, I let my GTD refer me to the project's Kanban, and sometimes I have even organized my GTD list as Kanban.

Appreciate the other books you recommended. I have posted the books that helped me in this thread too.

IloveHN84
I'm using the Bullet Journal method
acupofnope
+1 for the Bullet Journal method. I have lots of ideas that I want to work on and BuJo helps me take a step back and think about which ones are worth my time.
davidscolgan
The thing I love the most about the Bullet Journal idea is how simple and quick it is. Productivity systems that require a bunch of maintenance and fiddling never seem to work for me.
mondo9000
Realize that this behavior is just fancy procrastination. I can collect recipes all day, but it won't make me a better cook.
davidscolgan
Procrastination is fun and complicated. "Just Do It" doesn't seem to help much for me. After reading more I've found a number of reasons for procrastination that may be helpful depending on the cause:

Is the task too vague? If so, making it more concrete helps. "Do taxes" is impossibly vague and scary and the brain rebels. "Make a list of all expenses this year" is better but still large. This is the most common actually helpful advice I've found. But also

Do you not actually care about the task? Having a grand overarching goal for your career/life can help you make sure the task is worth doing. Or for something like taxes, you can say "this helps me achieve my goal because if I don't pay my taxes I'll probably go to jail."

Do you not believe your project will succeed? This is a subtle one I only recently discovered. If I'm working on an app or a business idea and I get to the point where I don't believe it has a chance, I strongly lose motivation. Some say this is a survival mechanism - if a hunter gatherer had a plan to kill a wooley mammoth with a spear up close and that'd probably result in death, a strong sense of "procrastination" could be a lifesaver.

Is it resistance to something that threatens your identity? This is a fun one - maybe you've internalized that you don't finish projects (I've had some of this I think). Finishing a project would threaten your "identity" of a non finisher, and some part of the brain _hates_ things that threaten it's identity. I think this one you just have to figure out a way to push through, and give that part of the brain fodder to convince itself that it's identity is not of "doesn't finish projects". The same can be true of earning money, and other kinds of success.

mondo9000
There's a lot of valid perspectives, but I think its some kind of false reward system. Archiving a link on neural-networks is a low effort task that superficially appears to move you toward your goal of machine learning, whereas the Coursera class takes work (ie. not fun struggling with Octave syntax)
matwood
The mind is great at rationalizing excuses. It is about executing. It is about having the discipline to do the things you don't want to do, but know they have to get done.

As soon as you start thinking about motivation, you have lost. Motivation is fleeting. Even the most important task that is also fun will likely become a grind before you are done. How do you get it finished? Have the discipline to grind it out.

I'm not implying any of this easy. When the alarm goes off every morning to go to the gym, it sucks. But I do it anyway. The first step is accepting it is not easy and it will suck at times.

MarsAscendant
> When the alarm goes off every morning to go to the gym, it sucks. But I do it anyway. The first step is accepting it is not easy and it will suck at times.

This is a major problem for me right now. The depression doesn't help, but it's clear that it needn't stop me from doing well – as evident from all the great stuff artists with depression have made.

How do you get to that point, mentally? Were you raised with discipline in mind – as in, were your parents/guardians promoting discipline within you? Did you get to it yourself?

mezod
See I might be wrong here, but I think the problem starts when you see yourself as a depressed person. Do you see yourself as someone who can wake up early and go to the gym? Do you see yourself as someone who could be disciplined?

Don't get me wrong, you might be a depressed person. I see depression as a water swirl that keeps dragging you down and doesn't let you look at yourself as what you could be. It's the typical comparison of "I am trying to quit smoking" and "I'm not a smoker".

You get to that point, mentally, by acting. Mentality affect behaviour, and behaviour affects mentality. If you see you can wake up, it's more easy that you'll see yourself as someone who can wake up and go to the gym.

MarsAscendant
To be fair, it's difficult to not see yourself as having <something> when <something> is everpresent in many aspects of your daily life.

I want to socialize, but it's difficult. I want to work out, but it's really difficult. I want to finish the projects I start, but it's almost impossible after a while. Not because I want it to be – so that, perhaps, I could escape the strain of putting in the effort – but because it just is. That's the sad part.

I get what you're saying – "Define yourself as someone who does the stuff you want to get done" – and I'm behind it. You're saying I should behave as if I'm already <someone> – the person who exercises, the person who socializes well, the person who finishes what they'd started?

I've tried that before. It worked for a while, but then it always gets to the point where I feel the kind of an existential "meh" – the apathy towards achieving the thing because the thing no longer seems meaningful, even though I realize how much I value it in my head. That's the sadder part.

Ernest Becker wrote about it in The Denial of Death. We all strive towards completing our projects of immortality – the things that memorialize us, the existence of which help us overcome physical death by becoming culturally immortal. People with depression lose faith in the fact that their projects are achievable.

But suppose it's not true: suppose I can actually manage it. What do I do?

matwood
I'll answer both your questions here:

> Were you raised with discipline in mind – as in, were your parents/guardians promoting discipline within you? Did you get to it yourself?

Good questions. I think I was raised with less forced discipline than most kids. I say forced because there was necessary discipline. My family didn't have much so when I was old enough to want money to buy things that meant finding a job. With that said, external discipline never lasts. IMO, that's more like motivation. There is a reason discipline is almost always called 'self' discipline. It comes from within.

> How do you get to that point, mentally? What do I do?

Understand that there is no end point. If I reached my goal today, I would just make another goal farther out. The goal becomes less important than the process.

Also understand it's never easy. You may think you have no discipline right now, but in reality I might be a half step closer than you are. I fail at my self discipline all the time. Good, it gives me something to work on.

What you need to do is simply start. IMO, exercise is so important not just physically but mentally. Powerlifting taught me so much about the grind and pushing forward when your body wants to stop. It took months one time for me to add 5# to my dead lift.

So workout - right now. Get up do some burpees, push ups, sit ups, and squats. In 20 minutes, workout one is done. Set your alarm for 20 minutes earlier and do the same tomorrow and the day after that. Ignore whether or not those 20 minutes are meaningful (do you ponder the meaningfulness of watching a single TV show??), just do it. Embrace the strain of putting in this tiny bit of effort to get up and workout.

MarsAscendant
> It took months one time for me to add 5# to my dead lift.

Holy cow! I would've quit after a few days of no progress.

Thank you for this reply. The workout felt good. I did a little bit of push-ups, squats, and plank, and it was a major boost already. Last time I exercised was a week ago.

How did you start? Was it the school PE? your parents' example?

matwood
By that point I had been dead lifting for years. Every 5# I added over 500# was a struggle. Some days progress was measured by lifting the bar 1” off the ground.

How did I start? Many years ago in my early 20s I thought I had it all. Great fiancé, good job, and a good life. I could see my whole future and it was good. Through a bunch of random circumstances I started playing DAoC (old school mmo). I had always played games for fun, so no big deal.

Fast forward 2 years and every waking moment I had that I wasn’t working I was playing DAoC. I was still doing my job, but I was certainly not excelling. Eventually my fiancé left me. Even though I quit DAoC Soon after, it was too late to get her back. It reminds me of a scene in Mushashi where he asks the priest why he tied him to a tree. The response was he tied tied those ropes himself - exactly as I had done.

Suddenly I had all this time, was getting pudgy, was depressed, and couldn’t sleep. My apartment had a gym so I started working out doing things like you just did today. Suddenly I was tired enough to sleep again, my confidence came back, and I had a new focus.

Later I found powerlifting and it was like finding zen. Take the craziness of the day, complexity of work, and relationships and throw all that out. While of course there is proper technique, the dead lift is simple. See that weight? Pick it up. Repeat :)

From that one self discipline decision to stop DAoC and then start working out so many other things presented themselves. I went back and finished grad school, excelled at better and better jobs, and today 15+ years later I’m married to a great woman.

I certainly have not perfectly followed self discipline this whole time, but even just the little I had made great changes for me. If I can be the catalyst for even just a single person to do the same, I’m happy :)

MarsAscendant
Glad to hear things worked out for you because you'd made a better choice. Shame that it came to that, of course, but once you're in a rut, the only good thing I reckon I can do is praise your efforts towards getting out. :)

What was your mindset like from the day you quit DAoC to now? Did you feel like it all doesn't matter anyway, so why bother? Was yours a resolute mind?

mezod
I agree that discipline > motivation. And thus, habit formation becomes important. What I'd like to add here is what I call "learn to enjoy". I try to "learn to enjoy" waking up in the morning to go to the gym. I think it's just an euphemism to lowering the barrier between "what I want to do" and "what I have to do". What makes waking up early suck at times? How can I make it suck it less? How can I actually turn my mindset around so that I actually want to wake up early and go to the gym?
matwood
Sure. I don't mind getting up many mornings at this point. What I wanted to head off though is people thinking that it's somehow easy. That I'm a 'morning' person, or I am different than everyone else somehow. I'm not. I get up early and workout because I chose to, and it's not always what I want to do.

My goal, if there could be one, is to make waking up early and working out just like breathing. It's not enjoyable, nor does it suck, it just is.

BeetleB
>It is about executing. It is about having the discipline to do the things you don't want to do, but know they have to get done.

This is just begging the question.

In my experience, coming up with systems that make the good stuff easy and the bad stuff hard trumps discipline in the long run.

mezod
this might be the single most useful reply in the whole thread.

Specificitiy (paragraph 2) is crucial.

I'd add that goals (paragraph 3) are a result of identity (paragraph 5) so it's basically the same idea. How do you see your better self? Do these projects/tasks align with your vision of your better self?

If you feel you are X (paragraph 5) and you feel you can be superX (paragraph 4) you'll undoubtedly be able to carry on with your goals (paragraph 3). Breaking these down (paragraph 2) will help.

Not satisfied with the way I put it but that's the idea.

MarsAscendant
You've hit the nail on the head for me with the last paragraph. Thank you for verbalizing it.
geezerjay
> Realize that this behavior is just fancy procrastination. I can collect recipes all day, but it won't make me a better cook.

I don't believe this assertion makes any sense. I may never be a Michelin-star chef, but if I set a goal to learn how to cook and set a plan on how to achieve that, I will surely be able to cook a decent meal within a reasonable amount of time and results will be far better than what I would get if I procrastinated instead.

sergiotapia
Also the mind is masterful at protecting it's ego by making you procrastinate things you think are difficult. You end up not doing them because you _think_ they're hard to do and you don't want to risk it.

Identify when this is happening and just do it. Force yourself to at least give it the 30 minute try and 90% of the time you'll find yourself in the zone and just doing it.

pliftkl
I love that. I definitely have more recipes than cooking skills. Better head to the kitchen!
therealdrag0
Reminds me of the quote "Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present." ― John Green, Looking for Alaska
Gonzih
I have a trello board with all personal ideas/projects. New idea? Write it down. Have some spare time? Do some work on one of the ideas/project. Trick is to optimize setup on anything you do in the way that it takes seconds to start working. For that you have to know an overview of what needs to be done and setup process should be as painless as possible.

Hardest for me in that regard are hardware projects. I don't really have any dedicated hardware workbench. So every time I have to get all my boxes out, all my equipment (soldering station, meeters, etc) and then pack it back. Which usually means I don't have enough time to do actual work.

k__
I'm trying Github projects this year. Maybe it helps.
davidscolgan
If you are building something software related, just using Github like you might on any paid gig or employment project is a solid idea.
timmahoney
I have a 24” x 18” whiteboard that has a Kanban layout on it. Smaller postit notes let me put a lot of things up and I follow the simple “Todo, In Progress, Done” column model. It’s on the wall at home where I have to look at it every day at least a few times.
Haul4ss
You're probably still trying to do too much.

Another user recommended The One Thing, and I'll second that. You have to always be prioritizing. Figure out what you really, REALLY want to do, and you will make time for it.

I definitely suffer from the "everything looks cool and fun" syndrome. There are a thousand things I want to learn and only enough time to learn maybe three of them.

You can do anything, but you can't do everything. So how do you decide what to do?

I also use a Full Focus Planner and the corresponding method that goes with it, to distill annual goals into quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily habits. FFP is definitely not for everybody, but when I commit to using it I do find I get a lot more done. Then I invariably fall off the wagon.

We're all a work in progress.

davidscolgan
Something that helped me regarding this - I took some time and made a document that contained every project on my plate. I realized I was trying to do 11+ projects of significant size. And as such I was really doing not much at all from worrying about not working on all the projects I wasn't working on right now when working on another project. Ack! But it's so easy to fall into that, especially for ambitious people like OP.
matwood
The One Thing is good. It was free to read on Kindle for Prime members recently. The OP should check if it's still there.

The hard part is figuring out the one thing. Tim Ferris talks about this a lot - finding the one thing that makes other things you want to do either irrelevant or so much easier. This concept has lots of names. Jocko Willinks books Extreme Ownership puts it simply as "prioritize and execute".

Anytime I feel overwhelmed with the amount I have to do what I have really done is not prioritize.

And yes, it is not easy and requires daily discipline.

burnt_toast
I once read in an biography on the Beatles that they would often hold off on writing down songs till the next day. Their theory was that if their song truly was "that good" they would have no trouble recollecting it the next day. And if they forgot it, then it clearly wasn't worth doing.

I like to apply this principle to a lot of the ideas I choose to work on. It's easy to think that every idea is the cat's pajamas, but sometimes it's best to let the concept cook for a bit. I find that after a few days or so the idea will have either fizzled out, and I'll have forgotten about it, or I'll be itching to really work on it.

This is just my 2 cents.

stevenkovar
Keep a rotating list of 20 goals—5 big, 15 small.

Star the 3 most important to you.

Put in time on one of the three each day until you fatigue.

Work then on one of the smaller goals.

Cross one off? File it for future reference, then replace.

Don't be hesitant to edit out and replace outdated goals. Your perspective can (and absolutely should) change quickly as you accomplish things you set out to do.

davidscolgan
Similar Warren Buffet's methodology - consider your top 25 priorities. Then pick the top 5. The next 20 are your "avoid at all costs" list, since they will always try to distract you.

I really like the idea of working on large and also small projects, since just sticking to one and only one thing is not always feasible.

sudofail
I used to do this too, but I think it results in too much scattered focus. What I've done for the last 8 years or so has been really effective, and has reduced my stress quite a bit.

Each year, I pick one larger goal that I want to achieve. It can be learning a new language, completing some Coursera courses, getting fit, traveling, etc. But I find if I just focus on one thing, I'm much more likely to achieve it.

It also reduces the stress to get all these other little things done. I still wind up doing a lot of them, but I don't feel any pressure or compulsion to get them done.

Memosyne
Every couple of months I open a text file, insert headers denoting the coming months, and write down things I have to accomplish under those headers. Whenever I progress an objective, I jot down the task that helped me progress in the past tense. For instance, under January I could add "Spend time with family" and under that I would include "Went snow boarding with siblings".

I do this because I'm not prescient; I don't know how unforeseen circumstances might affect my ability to complete my objectives. By only writing down things that I have completed, I'm not discouraging myself if/when I can't finish something.

Here is an example of what I mean:

# January

    # Work on personal projects

    # Study Graph Theory

        # Algorithms

            - Implemented Dijkstra's algorithm

        # Books

            - Read "Introduction to Graph Theory" by Richard J Trudeau
In short, I just organize my ideas into broad categories and then when I think I've progressed, I further categorize it.
mezod
AS a matter of fact, I do something similar. I recommend you try dynalist.io out. Much more powerful than a textfile :P
erikvann
By "life gets in between", do you mean that you have things you want to do but other random things pop up and you do those instead? If so this is a prioritization issue and maybe you need to start saying "no". If you can't really say no, then you need to plan for these things instead of letting them derail you.

Also as I am sure you know, you always think that you can get more done than you actually can. Plan to do less. I like to keep a list of things I'm working on this week and what I intend to finish today. I journal every morning about what is still in the today list. It helps me think about why that happened and what I can do about it.

b_b
I would recommend for you to read and implement the organization/productivity system from Getting Things Done by David Allen [0]. It discusses essentially your main problems of dividing up your life into projects and timing yourself. The system also includes sections for putting some of your ideas in an 'Incubate', basically putting it off for another day once you get through what you have. Having a running list of all your commitments and projects like the system does I think will help you to analyze your time usage and realistic expectations for your productivity and stuff you want to engage in.

[0] = https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Produ...

davidscolgan
Second reading this book at some point. I think what originally hung me up about it was that it isn't really prescribing an exact system, just a series of general ideas that you can use in whatever system you are using. It can be used with Trello or Asana or Omnifocus or pen and paper. But generally the idea of projects and an inbox and the someday maybe list are great. In short, get things out of your brain taking up cycles and into a system you trust.
slsii
I second this recommendation with a suggestion that has hugely helped me. I have more or less copied the approach to to-do lists described in that book into a Trello board and then – importantly – made it my home page on Chrome.

This accomplishes two things for me: 1) any time I open a new tab, I get a reminder of what needs to be done 2) adding an item or recording an idea to be processed later is just a cmd-t away.

This approach (combined with the Trello mobile app) has made the list so easy to maintain it's almost hard not to use it. YMMV, of course.

pqdbr
Could you provide a template for you trello board?
ff_
I'm also following a GTD-like approach (and I strongly second the recommendation on the book)

My Trello board has the following columns:

- MAYBE - for things that I'll maybe do

- BACKLOG - for things that I decided I'll do at some point

- WEEK - for things that I'll do this week (limit: 8 items)

- TODAY - for things I'll do today (limit: 5 items)

- DONE - move things here once done

Once a week I do a review session where I clean the "DONE" column and reshuffle things in the other columns as needed

SlowRobotAhead
Hmm,I hadn’t thought of a week/day in Trello. It’s an interesting idea, but having a les productive week seems like it really screws things up by forcing moving back to Maybe and Backlog while you plan out your week. But i see a possible benifit in that.

I wouldn’t do that to my collaborative work board, but for a personal board that seems interesting.

sbov
Here's my setup, it's pretty similar to the other person's:

Followup: stuff that I'm blocked on (e.g. maybe I'm waiting on someone, maybe I have to let something run for some time, etc)

Doing: stuff I'm actively working on

To Do: stuff I plan to do in the near term

Inbox: everything starts here

Backlog: stuff I want to eventually do

Anything I finish I archive.

cliffdover
I think this can be a very good start. Whenever I'm reminded of my tasks deadlines I'd work harder. Would also love to include different color signaling for deadlines...
wj
I do the same with a personal dashboard that pulls in my "today" Asana tasks as my new tab homepage. Are you using the New Tab Redirect Chrome extension? It seems that you can set a homepage for when you open a browser natively with Chrome but not a new tab.
TarpitCarnivore
My one caution with this: It's pretty easy to OVER categorize your life and never get anything done either. I had a former co-worker who read GTD and began to impliment it for everything. It felt like he was perpetually planning and never actually doing.

Additionally it became rather humorous to see how the most minute things became 'projects'. Sometimes it's worth just stepping back and observing what you're considering to be 'projects' or 'tasks' and ask if you're over doing it.

taurath
To defend GTD slightly, one of the core tenants is if it will take less than 15 minutes or so, do it now (maybe it’s 5 - I stretch it to however long it takes me to do dishes or mop the floor).
henrikeh
The text mentions 2 minutes as the time for “just do it now” tasks.

However, Allen recommends finding a thresholds which fits your situation.

wazz
[ "one of the core tenants" -> "one of the core tenets". tenants live somewhere; tenets are principals, beliefs. ]
tertius
And for people who make these mistakes it's probably helpful to re-read Allen's book and fix these issues.

> It's pretty easy to OVER categorize your life and never get anything done either.

This is called procrastination.

> perpetually planning and never actually doing

GTD is specifically about clearing your mind so that you can focus on doing without distraction.

JackMcMack
I can also recommend GTD, it was definitely an eye opener.

A few takeaways for me:

* There is no (need for) 1 list to rule them all. I'm using Google Inbox, Calendar, Keep, Post-it notes in the house on doors & walls, and a handwritten notebook for my day job.

* Inbox helped me organize a lot better. Snooze is great for getting an empty inbox. It used to have "snooze to someday" to incubate, but unfortunately that's not an option anymore. I still have 50+ items in there that I review a few times a year. I'm sad inbox is getting killed. Gmail has most of the functionality, but the UI is waaaay to busy.

* Keep is nice for simple lists. Grocery shopping has become a lot faster and easier. I will try to order the list so I can pick up everything in one pass. The kids & wife are joining the shopping trip? We can split up, see the list update instantly, and be done in half the time.

* GTD defines 5 phases: collect, process, organize, review, do. I wasn't used to having collect as a separate phase, but a lot of sites make this easy. Inbox has reminders, and a browser extension to save any page, Reddit has a save button, Inoreader has starred items. HN even has a favorite button, but does a very good job of hiding it. Seriously, I have to click on the post/comment age to favorite it?

justadudeama
I agree with this as well. Reading this book really helped me get organized.

Some of the information on it is getting a _little_ bit dated. In particular, it talks a lot about the different 'contexts' you have your tasks to complete, like at home, at work, at a coffee shop, etc. I feel like this holds up a little bit less nowadays, because almost the entirety of all my work can be done if I have my laptop with me.

This book is a great foundation for you to build off of and make your own 'system'.

orev
I don’t think the idea of contexts is dated at all, it just sounds like it doesn’t apply to your situation specifically because you have special circumstances. Most people don’t have that flexibility. It’s important to understand when things don’t apply only to you vs when they really don’t apply generally (when giving advice).
taurath
I find the idea of contexts holds up even more importantly - In fact if you are constantly context switching (social phone at work, etc) it may be something you have to enforce yourself
lazyasciiart
I believe there is an updated version.

Contexts should be adjusted to make them personally useful - mine are mostly categories like "work", "home", "community group" so that I can sit down and focus on work tasks without seeing other stuff, and then I can spend a solid hour working on my community stuff, etc. I also have a couple place- contexts: "house" for things like fixing a thing, "9-5" for tasks that have to be done during business hours, and if I have travel etc coming up I might sort some stuff into "offline", like reading a bunch of docs I have downloaded.

BeetleB
After trying GTD for about 7-8 years, I gave up.

I mean, I kept using it, thinking it was working, but I'd look back and ask myself key questions:

1. How often do I stop looking at my lists, because I felt overwhelmed?

2. How often do I need to spend a large amount of time cleaning up the lists?

3. How often are things getting missed? How often am I doing things not in my GTD lists because I couldn't figure out how to put it in there?

4. How often do I tweak my GTD system to fix the above?

And so on - I realized that while GTD was of some help, it was not really working.

It did have some useful things/ideas, and as such it was not at all a waste. However, it really didn't do a good job of the fact that my lists were huge. I think he recommends looking at your Someday/Maybe in the weekly (or monthly?) review. That list is huge.

Even the TODO list can be large with his system. I don't think he addresses granularity well. Should my TODOs be the mundane small things, or just the big picture project (he leans towards the former). In reality, the potential Next Action on a project could be multiple things, so I would have multiple TODOs (it's not always clear which one I can do first due to external constraints).

His system is mostly priority agnostic. He does address it a little (10000 ft view, etc), but it was very vague.

No clear guidance on how to know if you're trying to do too much. Especially needed with GTD, because as a system, it makes it easy to try to do too much.

I think if someone could write a book with all the stuff GTD is poor at or doesn't address, with solutions, then GTD + that system may actually be great.

It's a good book, but don't beat yourself up if it doesn't work well for you. Try to tweak it to your needs, and if that doesn't work, look for something else.

loteck
You're describing success, not failure. The GTD system is generally so good at streamlining work that a novice will react to the new streamlining and the sudden availability of time and mind space by simply filling the space with "more to do". GTD is agnostic about the quantity of work you take on.

If you like using systems to help balance out your selection of work, I would suggest looking into OKRs. The book Measure What Matters is a good start.

BeetleB
>GTD is agnostic about the quantity of work you take on.

Which makes it only a partial success. I disagree that it is agnostic. It does recommend you evaluate it - it just doesn't give any idea how.

I'll look at the other resources - thanks.

j45
I second Getting Things Done. This book is a little engine of productivity. It was responsible for a good chunk of any special productivity I've been perceived to have.

The book is easy to start with as your read it because it ties together skills you already have with creating an air tight system that enables your brain to trust you trust you not to forget anything - lowering your mental and cognitive load so you can focus in the present by taking a unique approach..

It literally lets you collect every random thought that has no relevance to the moment, capture it in a "someday/maybe" pile and put it away for future review. The brain, one emptied is ready to focus.

The new edition is updated for digital life too, which is great, I try to read it every year or two as well to keep sharp, the current read has been a nice refresher.

Currently using the newest 2Do app between Android/MacOS/Windows /iOS. It's really decent inter platform tool. If you're all Mac a lot of people like omnifocus too. I found other apps (things, toodle, rtm) lack the ability to break apart projects into super detail when needed but otherwise are great.

There are a few other books that help build a car around this engine (Mindset, Focal Point, So good they can't ignore you, Deep Work), but a car without an engine isn't a car.

JunkDNA
I agree completely. This book was recommended to me as “life changing”. I was skeptical given that my experience is that 90% of self help books are a rehash of “How to win Friends and Influence People”.

As I have moved into professional roles with progressively more responsibility, the tools and techniques in this book are what have allowed me to scale myself out in a way that my prior ways of working would not have enabled. Many productivity tips (such as inbox zero) have their roots in this book.

maire
I used to use GTD. I still use it for reactive tasks. It is not good at proactive tasks. I use evernote as a GTD repository, but I only act on it occasionally.

Since I retired my tasks are by nature proactive (since they come from me). I tend to organize by long term goals. I start a goal by defining the success criteria for that goal then each long term goal is a "project" in an outline text file. Each morning I look at my long term goals and decide what I want to make progress on today. That turns into a backlog for today.

Since one of my long term goals was to learn swift - I wrote an iphone app to parse the file for items marked "@today" and turn that into a todo list that I can carry with me. Apple made this convenient when they added an icloud file system for the iphone.

elliotec
I’m really very surprised that so many people recommend GTD. I absolutely hated the book. It felt like he was trying to sell the book for half of it. The techniques are very outdated and manual. It requires a huge amount of categorization to the point of way too much. I tried it, and really strongly do not recommend it in any way. It’s like Org Mode in emacs. Feels like most people just recommend it because they bought into it so heavily and hive-minded around it. Sorry but I really wanted to balance out the positive comments about GTD.
orblivion
Ditto, plus I feel like it sort of poisoned my thinking on task management. I'm obsessive by nature, and I think it made me more obsessive.
joegahona
I agree -- the two things I took from it were to write everything down and to do things immediately that will take less than 2 minutes. Other than that it was overkill for me.
desireco42
Sometimes in December last year, I started using Bullet Journal again. I got a book and read it and applied it. What I discover, that along with other tools, it does help me feel focused and less overwhelmed.

For projects, I kind of need Pivotal Tracker to be able to organize and do things. I still write them down in my notebook also, otherwise I have two different places for things (which I do). Hope this makes sense.

elorant
I have a rather meticulous program. For starters, I write everything down on a daily log. Thoughts, notes, tasks, everything. I do it with pen and paper because I like writing and it helps me thinking things more thoroughly. Then at the end of the day I move actionable tasks to a different journal which has to-do lists by project. At the beginning of each week I peruse the projects lists and choose tasks to move to a weekly to-do list. This way I have a planned-ahead weekly schedule which keeps me from procrastinating.

I suppose if you can focus on a single project you don't need to go into such lengths of detailed logging. But for me it's imperative to keep detailed notes because I work on multiple projects simultaneously, and I can also keep track of older ideas that might get lost in the mayhem that goes around in my head. The best way to stop procrastinating is to break down projects to single tasks. Then I don't feel overwhelmed by the variety of tasks I have to accomplish. I only need to do a single task each time. I've adopted this system in the last couple of years and my productivity has increased at least 100%.

dhimes
This is quite similar to my approach. I use the same notebook for my actionable tasks though (my daily to-do list is in this notebook), project-related stuff is kept together in separate files if necessary. The layout of the 'action-day' calendar comes closest to meeting my needs, so I use it

https://www.amazon.com/Action-Day-Planner-2019-Productivity/...

Something like this for keeping track of the project information (note: I haven't actually listened to this podcast).

https://www.steverrobbins.com/getitdoneguy/152-project-statu...

acutesoftware
Writing down your ideas is a good thing - you may likely come back to them later and expand / learn from them.

I think the trick is to work out what you "really want to execute" vs "what you are willing to spend time to execute". If you have a lot of ideas, you will not be able to execute them all, and that is a hard pill to swallow.

Like you, I have lots of ideas I'd love to complete but time is a factor - pick the ones you want to finish first, and work through them. Write the others down, so you can expand on them later if you want.

And don't forget to take time to relax - there is such a thing as idea burnout https://www.lifepim.com/blog/5737_Take_time_to_relax

geezerjay
> I think the trick is to work out what you "really want to execute" vs "what you are willing to spend time to execute". If you have a lot of ideas, you will not be able to execute them all, and that is a hard pill to swallow.

The Eisenhower Decision Matrix is a very effective framework to decide which tasks to execute and which goals to drop.

lovelearning
4 text files that go from vague life goals down to concrete hourly tasks:

- todo-year.txt : all goals for the year

- todo-month.txt : track subset of annual goals to finish this month

- todo-week.txt : track all monthly high-level tasks to finish this week

- todo.txt : daily task plan based on weekly plan. Switch tasks every 1 hour. In a day, I plan for about 4 tasks, so each task ends up getting about 2 hours.

Self-employed consultant here who has suffered from chronic procrastination after my daily routine became disorganized and unsupervised for some years. If I focus on only one thing for days on end, I feel I'm not doing much. The system above has helped me reduce (but not eliminate) both procrastination and distractions, and given me some satisfaction that I'm being relatively more productive.

MarsAscendant
The tiering of goals in the way you've done it is brilliant.

Do you consult upper-tier lists when making lower-tier assignments?

lovelearning
That is in fact the core of the idea. I suck at low-level planning. All the wishful annual life goals have to trickle down as concrete daily activity to get anywhere. My mind is excellent at building castle projects in the air and even good at high-level analysis of them using flowery language. What it sucks at is converting all that into concrete steps. That's why I have to explicitly break them down into monthly, weekly, daily, and even hourly chunks.
MarsAscendant
Was this a natural progression of your system, or did you have to try it to see that it works?
lovelearning
Good question - made me revisit my memories.

TLDR some aspects were a progression, but the planning part was something I had to try out over a year to convince myself that I finally have something that works.

I'd say I have always done the daily todo all my professional life. Started it as my daily work plan when I was a salaried employee. Only tracked work-related tasks with it, but it was necessary because I had multiple project responsibilities and deadlines then. I actually thought of myself back then as a very disciplined person.

Even the life goals thing is something I have been doing from my salaried years. An annual document where I wrote details about my career wishes and personal improvements for the coming year. There were plans in those docs, but they were rather nebulous and not tracked.

That system worked ok for my salaried life. But when I became a consultant, things fell apart. When I had client projects to work on, my work-life balance became terrible, I missed project deadlines constantly, missed out on hobbies, and felt stressed and demotivated. When I did not have client projects, I went the other extreme - making lots of plans but terribly distracted and not finishing anything. Until then, I had not realized just how much of my earlier discipline was not because of me alone, but actually because of the structured and supervised environment inside a company. When I went alone, much of my discipline disappeared, and along with it, my self-confidence. I had actually refused lucrative client projects because I wasn't confident of meeting any deadlines.

I tried many planning systems over those years. GTD, Trello, Mind mapping tools. It's taken me a lot of self-analysis, experimentation and tweaks to understand why I had planning problems, and what I should do to overcome them. The main evolution between the system I have now versus the system I had back then is that all life goals now trickle down into concrete hourly tasks. While 2015 was a terrible year professionally, this system helped me improve my situation in 2016, and more so in 2017-2018. It's working out for me, thankfully.

MarsAscendant
Thanks a lot for the answer.

Do you have a routine to (re)visit your plans and see if you're on the right track? Do you even have a concept of the wrong track under this system?

How does your work time, according to the `todo`, fare against leisure time? Is it similarly scheduled, or does it come whenever the work hours have been accomplished?

Do you ever miss your goals during the hours of work? What do you do if that happens?

lovelearning
Revisiting: Yes, all the time. The yearly plan would be framed at the start of the year, but new opportunities and personal ideas arise quite often and unexpectedly. If something can help me achieve my life goals better, the entire planning cascade gets reprioritized from that point on. I have done things like defer personal projects, drop ideas that turned out to be impractical after prototyping (an example of a wrong track), and renegotiate scope of client projects. It's a dynamic thing - the idea of the system is to force life goals to convert into concrete daily activities, but the goals themselves can and have changed.

Leisure time: Leisure time is very much part of the daily plan. I put tasks like jogging, workout, reading, going out in all my plans. Even have things like fitness annual goals and explicitly write them in my weekly schedule and daily plans. Anything that I should allocate time for goes into these files.

Missed goals: Yes, that happens. I'm quite bad at time estimation, and some ideas involve a lot of exploratory prototyping that may take much more time than anticipated. I mark incomplete tasks as [PARTIAL] or [SKIPPED], analyze at the end of the D/W/M what made me skip them, adjust scope if required, and modify my plans to correct the problem by next D/W/M.

MarsAscendant
> Leisure time is very much part of the daily plan. I put tasks like jogging, workout, reading, going out in all my plans.

This kind of discipline sounds impressive. (I don't think I can follow something quite so meticulous: it'll probably confuse me.)

How do you fill out a `todo`? Are they different for each category? are they mostly similar? under the same template?

beetwenty
I can't speak for OP, but I've been addressing "leisure planning" primarily with logging and reminders instead of planners: I received a Fitbit over the holidays which has done a great job of encouraging me to block out 10 minute activity breaks and to stick to a certain wake-up time. I just used break time to do some cleaning and often start chores like laundry and dishes on breaks too. When the "activity day" ends, it's functionally like "work is over, real leisure can begin," although since I am working independently I tend to spread everything across the day, just now I bias towards household chores and physical work early in the day, and mental work later. It works for me since I no longer have to feel disciplined about physical activity - it's simply built into the schedule that I will get up and do something, so something will get done at random, and when the break is over I can just put it down and come back to it.

For gym time I use the FitNotes Android app to track progress and set session goals. I have done this for about two years successfully. Since this has gotten me on a roll, most recently I installed ActivityWatch to correlate the sleep/activity/health metrics against my screen time. What I find most important for myself is closing the loop of goals/plans/feedback: if some part of it is missing then progress stops. Usually it's lack of feedback that causes the biggest problems.

MarsAscendant
I've been thinking about specified breaks. My idea was: a 5- or 10-minute break every hour, away from the laptop, doing anything at all. I've noticed that, once AFK, I have my mind back: it springs back, outputs ideas, regains its perspective...

I've also been thinking about implementing pre- and post-workday breaks, for 1 and 2 hours, respectively.

The former is about starting the day right: instead of diving into whatever web the Internet has for me (a web of my own making, don't get me wrong), I could take a walk, or do a little cleaning, or cook, or read, or...

The latter, preceded by an hour of review, is to wind down, in order to maintain a proper sleep pattern (which I have serious problems with at the moment: waking up at 1 PM is not good for me).

Let's see how it works for me.

Best wishes to you and your own scheduling. I hope it works out to an excellent result for you.

lovelearning
You can be as meticulous or as high-level as you want, depending on your disposition.

Because my default state is one of procrastination and laziness, I have to explicitly plan such things. If I don't, the other work or distractions will just expand to fill my time, and I'll just keep perpetually delaying them only to find at the EOM that I didn't indulge in my favorite hobby for even 1 hour the entire month, and that feels really bad. My system has evolved to overcome my own mental handicaps.

But I personally know 5x times more productive people - with spouses and multiple kids and time sinks like house constructions - who don't do anything like what I do and still manage to fulfil all their professional and personal plans much better than I do.

I have only one daily, one weekly, one monthly and one yearly file. Each file covers all categories of life goals. Organizing categories into multiple files seems natural at first and I had tried it in the past with mind mapping tools, but quickly realized that tracking and updating them is inconvenient and didn't really help me with planning my day. Here's an excerpt[1] from my daily todo to show what 2 days daily plan looked like - maybe it gives a better idea of what I'm describing.

[1]: https://pastebin.com/tXtyXuEU

MarsAscendant
Thanks for sharing your view on this.

I feel, with a certain definitiveness, that I need a schedule. Rather than working on a strict task-to-task basis, I feel like what I need is an obligation: "Do project X at 10, for at least an hour, then take your time until project Y at 2" etc.

Just thinking out loud.

Best wishes to your progress.

gyvastis
This is brilliant! Thanks!
lovelearning
You're welcome!

But I'd like to caution people here who are impressed with my system that in the past, I too have been very impressed by other people's planning systems. I have tried a bunch of systems and tools that have worked for others - GTD, Pomodoro, Mind mapping, Trello, Kanban. But they did not work for me, often for minor reasons. The problem was not with those systems, but with my mind. Understanding how my own brain works, knowing its quirks, and using something that gets out of the way is how I got here. Text files and simple command-line tools work and even motivate me, but may not work or motivate somebody else. I'd suggest focussing on knowing your own quirks, and on ways you know can improve your self-discipline. The tools are usually not the root problem.

juvoni
I do something similar.

It's similar to reverse engineering the year starting from the year end goals, although I personally think more in terms of building personal systems instead of setting annual goals.

The book "The One Thing" talks a bit more about that concept of breaking down the year into, quarters, then from quarters into months and then into weekly sprints and daily tasks.

I also wrote a little bit about my high level process here: https://juvoni.com/you-are-a-rocketship/

lovelearning
You have explained it beautifully in your blog! Matches a lot of my own thinking on the topic and workflows.
graeme
Hoe do you review and decide what to move between places? And, how do you handle smaller todos: get milk, register domain, clean fridge, call dentist, etc

Do those go in the list, or are they handled elsewhere?

Review and menial tasks are the two things that trip up my efforts at a system.

Also, where do you keep working notes for tasks in these lists: in the list or elsewhere?

I'm very interested, it sounds like a good system.

lovelearning
Reviewing: I review the daily todo every morning and update it every night, and I do EOW and EOM status updates with detailed analyses for the weekly and monthly files. Why could I not finish something? What should I do next month to correct it? That kind of analysis.

Moving / Reprioritizing: It's a necessity for me, because unlike a salaried job, I have to balance between my revenue-earning work and my hobbies. I do have to defer tasks often, to a different week or even a different month, all the time. The EOW and EOM updates are when I decide what I should defer to later. But the ideal is to stick to the schedule as much as possible through self-discipline and willpower.

Working notes: Each project and idea gets its own directory. I maintain current status of each project in its directory along with detailed notes, so that I can pick it right back months later. These are stored and tracked outside the above todo system. Since I review even the yearly goals everyday, everything gets done to a reasonable extent even if it's some months later than planned.

Trivial tasks: When I started off, I had just the yearly and daily todos. It's precisely because of trivial tasks - esp tasks which are one-time but critical nonetheless - that I introduced weekly and monthly todos. Anything important that takes time and requires me to allocate time goes into one of these lists. Otherwise my mind is unable to allocate time efficiently. Very trivial tasks like "have lunch" don't go anywhere, but I keep buffers in the daily todo for all such daily routine tasks.

If you are into learning stuff, you have probably heard of "deliberate practice". Reviewing tasks daily/weekly/monthly, and explicitly analyzing and planning for them is my way of "deliberate practice" for my life goals. I have tried a lot of visual tools in the past - GTD tools, Trello, Mind mapping - but two problems all of them had was 1) writing detailed analysis is not possible in the given interface and 2) they are designed as store to remember tools which means review may be possible but deliberate practice of planning is not easy.

graeme
Thank you! I truly appreciate you taking the time to explain all that. I think this system could work for me. I've just added those four text files into a folder, a notes folder, and also found an ios app which lets me easily view and edit txt files via Dropbox. (Textor)

So, you review all four files each day? I'm guessing that if the review system is properly done, then daily and weekly files see the most change?

I've also had issues with trello and other apps, and agree it's hard to handle the analysis within the interface. I don't follow your second point though. What do you mean by store to remember, and how does it inhibit planning but allow review?

Am also self employed, so looking forward to this system. Self management required constant attention.

Also this is a trivial feature, but do you list things with asterisks and cut/paste them down to a "Done" area when finished? Or something else?

lovelearning
Reviewing: I read all 4 files everyday to motivate, reinforce my memory and also see if anything is off track. It can happen sometimes that I have ended up allocating too much time to one thing and not enough to another. Daily reading corrects helps correct that. I write end of day analysis every night, end of week analysis on Sunday nights, and end of month analysis on last day of the month. Daily file sees the most changes, weekly less so. Monthly and yearly typically change if I get a new idea or drop an idea or get approached with a new project.

Problems with other tools: Writing a daily plan from scratch helps me go into the details of the task for that day. My experience with those other tools was that they were ok for creating a high-level plan once, store it, modify it occasionally and even review it everyday. But the interfaces were not convenient to design a detailed daily plan everyday, which meant a lazy person like me would simply review the plan without much modification, and I'd also lose the history of the project. In my text file, I can easily see if I end up with a long sequence of partial or skipped tasks, and make some corrections, but in those tools I could not.

Done tasks: I just write [DONE] / [PARTIAL] / [SKIPPED] against the task, along with reasons for the latter two. If I accumulate too many partial or skipped tasks on consecutive days, something is wrong - typically I'd have underestimated complexity of some idea - and a correction is required at least in the weekly plan.

My best wishes for your system! Keep at it with systematic self-analysis, and you'll be able to find and correct your weaknesses.

jwong_
Sorry if asking too much about the details, but I'm interested in how you track a task being delayed multiple times for consecutive days.

Do you just know it from daily analysis, or are you creating a new file for each day/week/month, and periodically look through those?

And how about weeks, new file for each week? or just clear it out every new week, and bring stuff back up to the year file?

lovelearning
I have exactly 4 files - no new files. At the end of the D/W/M/Y, I just add a new section on top and plan the period there. So each file has a record of all previous period plans. These are all cumulative files - I never clear out previous period's plans, just add a new section on top.

To see a task that's delayed multiple times, I just have to scroll down and look for [PARTIAL]/[SKIPPED] markers and their analyses. Usually, the daily analysis results in some corrective action that may also go into the weekly or monthly plans.

jwong_
Thanks! that clears things up.

I'm going to run with this & iterate over the next few weeks. Last couple of days have already been nice, dumping all my disparate lists into these 4 files.

billfruit
What if you are traveling, and can't access your pc?
lovelearning
These are plain text files that I sync using a git repo on my private server. I don't need to travel much, but I do switch between 3 machines regularly, which means I have to sync them up often. I use git command line.
pbreit
That seems _much_ more convoluted than a synced notes app. Worth the effort?
lovelearning
Most of the time, I'm on laptops or a desktop. All Linux. I'm comfortable with the command-line and have moved away from GUI tools. So, I don't find this workflow convoluted.

Not much of a mobile user and use very few apps. I especially don't use apps that store data on external servers. I use Evernote for storing some information, but not for any kind of planning. I'm sure good apps with self-hosted options exist, but this system works for me, is efficient, and so I don't feel like trying out anything else.

steelframe
The elegance of any given tool or language doesn't matter. What matters is what you as a user are motivated to use to solve the problem.
war1025
For anyone that already uses git for work, it doesn't seem like much of a difference from normal workflows.

I also use git to handling backup and syncing of a bunch of personal data.

One of my projects for the new year is I've started keeping a daily journal both for personal stuff and for work.

I have a git repo with two folders "Personal" and "Work". I run "vim `date -I`" to open a file for the current day and add to it periodically throughout the day. Each time I add something I just commit and push like I do already for work.

I've found that it has been helpful at work in particular for maintaining a running log of what I'm planning to do and what I've actually gotten around to.

Like all new years resolution things, time will tell if I actually keep it up.

But I guess circling back around: Git works really well for syncing things between machines. That's sort of what it's for after all.

pbreit
Mobile?
war1025
Not a priority for me. I actually don't even own a smartphone. I'm not saying using git to manage things is the right solution for everyone, but it does make sense for a lot of use cases.
Robinxd
Check out syncthing or resiliosync
graeme
I'm trying op's system. I put the text files in a top level folder in dropbox. So any machine of mine can access them.

For iphone/ipad, I use Textor to quickly access and edit them. It's faster than the dropbox app, which requires taps to get to the right place and a further tap for edit mode. Textor is about as fast as on my computer.

I'm guessing android has an equivalent app.

Sir_Cmpwn
I don't use these tiers, but in terms of tooling simple text files is definitely the way to go.
lovelearning
Yup. Command-line, git and a dumb text file editor are all that I use.

But I wasn't always this way. Used to be a Windows guy in the past and used to prefer specialized GUI tools over command-line or general tools. Have tried all kinds of planning tools - GTD tools, Trello, some Kanban stuff, multiple Mind mapping tools. All of them had some minor deficiency or the other which I'd end up obsessing over, instead of doing my actual freaking work. It's taken me years to satisfy myself that git and an editor are more than enough.

rodolphoarruda
I use a 4 file system as well. I keep them in Evernote for easy access.

- health: things I need to do to improve my health. It goes from food recipes to medical appointments to exam results.

- future: I'm in my mid-forties, so I look ahead with more pragmatism in my eyes. In this file I put the kind of work (or projects) I want to be involved with until retirement (included). Info here serves as directives for all the things I need/want to do.

- want!: here I list the things I want to buy in order to "settle down" as a consumer. I put a total cost of things in the bottom line of the file. It shows $ 12,000 as of today.

- tasks: my consolidated to-do list.

joshgel
I have a "want" list in evernote too! I think it helps me buy less stuff that I don't really need. I add stuff to it when I see something on the expensive side that I 'want' but am not sure about purchasing. I check on it every once in a while and think "why did I want a GoPro, I never would have used it". Boom saved $500.
rodolphoarruda
Yes. What I do is I leave the item in the list but cross it out to indicate I have changed my mind. I have 7 different motorcycle models listed, all crossed out at the moment as I gave up the idea of buying one. I bought an XBOX instead of a PS4, I check marked the former and crossed out the latter.
sh87
I started something similar. I keep a list of all the money that I saved by either not buying some fancy thing, use a cheaper service, DIY/repair, etc. Then, I spend it on some cheap thrills. Funnily, This process has made me happier. I kinda have a good reason to say no!
rsync
"4 text files that go from vague life goals down to concrete hourly tasks ..."

I do the same thing but I keep all of them in a single text file and hide sections with the "fold" feature of vim.

I tried last year to dive deep into markdown and emacs and evil mode, blah blah blah, but in the end the only thing I really needed was the folding feature of vim.

What makes it work for me is folding based on any kind of indent (tab or space) and fold-toggle with the 'tab' key.

The indent folding I use is at 0xRKTFUG[1] and the tab-as-fold-toggle (along with a few other folding items) is at 0x3HS2RD.

[1] https://0x.co/RKTFUG ... and so on ...

was8309
folding based on any kind of indent is great, and why I've used jEdit for years
baxtr
4 columns in Trello wouldn’t do the job?
charlesju
The problem is that you don't want to see a lot of the other goals very often, you want to stay focused on what you want to do, so a primary TODO is a great way to do that.

I also find that the speed to setting your TODOs matters a lot, and nothing is faster than a TXT file, especially if you travel a lot and internet can be spotty.

As a mental trick, it also seems to help that the first thing I do is look at my TODO since it's the fastest and untethered from my web browser. Once I open my web browser, I need to check e-mail and other things and it's quick and easy to get distracted before you're focused on your short term goals for your working session.

But of course, if Trello works for you, but all means.

lovelearning
It's a subjective preference.

I have tried Trello in the past over an extended period, but it didn't motivate me to keep using it.

Elsewhere, I have talked about solving disorganization by knowing the quirks of one's own mind.

One of my quirks was internet distractions, and at one point, it got so bad that I'd simply keep my router switched off and use an inconvenient mobile for any research. No easy internet=less distractions, but also no trello.

Another quirk is that I like to write down my planning analyses and thoughts, sometimes in multiple paras. They help me to plan and correct plans. Trello or mind mapping interfaces are not convenient to satisfy that kind of quirk. TXT is ideal for it.

baxtr
Thanks for your answer. I use something similar but in Trello. It is ok for me.

BTW: your method reminded me of this article which influenced my thinking around self organizing

https://www.jotform.com/blog/success-without-motivation/

lovelearning
That article really resonates with my thinking, thanks for the link. In the past, my planning used to be guided purely by what ideas I found exciting. Important, but unexciting tasks were deferred or left unattended. My system now allows me to work on tasks even on days when I don't particularly feel like working on them.
charlesju
Me too! At least with the single TODO.txt.

Here are some other tips:

-- I sync my TODO.txt with Google Drive so when I switch computers, or I want to check on my phone it's sync'd.

-- I don't do weekly or monthly goals, but I do yearly check-ins with myself and every few weeks after I feel like I'm not as focused as I want to be. I keep those goals in Google Docs since those are things that I want a more permanent place.

dorfsmay
I have tried all sorts of methods and software, but in the end always ended up with a single "today.txt" file.

This year I have started to the same thing, split into today/this_week/this_month but also buy, sell, and for repetitive events, monthly (change passwords, upgrade comps, lubricate all the things), spring and autumn.

I try to review most weekly, with a special focus on this_week, this_month, buy and sell.

klenwell
I do something very similar but I use a Trello board with columns like these. Specifically:

- Daily

- Weekly

- Monthly

- [YEAR] Completed

I like Trello because the cards support checklists, due dates, and comments which are great features for promoting habits associated with getting stuff done. Some cards are recurring (getting moved from monthly or weekly to daily column), others are finishable. I take a small but real pleasure in moving cards between columns and especially getting things over into the annual completed column.

One note on the due dates: I don't use due dates as deadlines. I use them as "check in on this no later than" dates. For me, the distinction is critical.

liminal18
have the same setup actually although I use kanban zone a site I worked on instead =)
nextos
For any workflow, it is worth considering org-mode. It has certainly satisfied me after trying many different alternatives.

It is plain text, so you are not locked into a proprietary object format. Thus, you can edit it using any text editor in case Emacs is not around. In fact, Vim is on its way towards implementing a decent subset of org-mode. GitHub and GitLab also support org-mode syntax and can even render HTML from it. There are also decent mobile clients, and even some bridges to things like Trello.

Emacs has lots of org-mode primitives that can be used to deploy any workflow. Moving items across sections or files can be efficiently done using org-refile. Storing new items on the flight from many different places can be done using org-capture and org-protocol. More importantly, you can easily create alternative views of your files using org-agenda. org-mode also has timestamps, so you can set schedules, deadlines or simply record events.

I've just scratched the surface. My favorite workflow is Ivy Lee's Method, which is a very basic kanban with two states. Easy to implement in org-mode. Just two trees: Today and Inbox. Every morning I refile 6 tasks from Inbox to Today. I keep new thoughts and important items with deadlines, etc inside my Inbox. I can use org-agenda to quickly see if there are any incoming deadlines or events, which I store in a separate calendar file.

If you want to get fancy, you can use lots of trees, one per project. And create lots of tasks to plan things ahead. Then use task states to schedule things for today and get a clean view, again, using org-agenda or a sparse tree. There are infinite possibilities.

dirtmerchant
I have enough in my todo list without adding “learn emacs” to it.
wrkronmiller
How do you deal with dependencies and blockers?

Edit: for example if you are waiting on an update to a library or a new version of iOS/Xcode?

lovelearning
Blocker in client project : either DIY, or look for workarounds, or escalate to client and reduce scope. Planning gets suitably modified for rest of the week and month.

Blocker in personal projects : some of my ideas have turned out to be not as easily implementable as I had first imagined. I usually reduce scope - because the idea after all started off as part of some life goal - but I have also dropped some ideas entirely. I record the reasons in the project directory to revisit later. I deliberately avoid overanalyzing in such cases - as somebody prone to procrastination, overanalysis of a tough idea is like entering a blackhole for me.

ArtWomb
Over organization can kill the spirit. Especially in creative endeavors. Let's say you are working in independent game development. And you alone are responsible for all design, tech, art, music and distribution. Allocating hourly intervals for each task at a set time each day can breed monotony. Rather, when you feel that inner fire to work on the music. Focus solely on that one task for an uninterrupted period of 4 hours. And always with the tools of reinforcement to show steady progress, such as documenting everything and visualizing milestones.

I thought it was really interesting to hear about Ninja, the fabled Fortnite streamer, talk about his work ethic. Which was basically to have two 4 hour chunks of livestreaming per day. One in the morning, and one at night. Separated by a 4 hour slot in the middle to spend with family and friends. He's had the discipline to keep it up for a decade, even when few people were watching. But having that accountability of an audience to livestream to, provides the impetus for daily progress.

Best of luck ;)

taurath
I find that for tasks that I already know what to do with low ambiguity scheduling works best, while tasks that have high ambiguity I might need to find the right time to expend a bunch of energy.
acconrad
For things I need to do that have a date and time: I put them in Google calendar. Even for the most mundane of activities.

For things that don't have a specific date and time but I know I need to do them: I put them in Asana. And I have them organized by day, so my main Asana page has subsections labeled "Monday:" "Tuesday:" etc and I just put all of my todos and spread them out throughout the week.

These two things have done enormous things for my productivity.

everdev
Are you doing these projects for fun, future profit, knowledge?

Whatever your answer is right now doesn't seem to be sufficient motivation. We all get the same time during the day but we all prioritize our day differently. You're prioritizing other activities over these projects (maybe for very valid reasons).

If you try and fail to create a habit, then you need a better reason for doing it.

Sometimes stoic philosophy can help find out why you want to do something: https://youtube.com/watch?v=A0XxceO4qX0

nemoniac
Org mode: https://orgmode.org/
ColinWright
That might be true, but Org Mode is phenomenally powerful, and you haven't told us what you do or how you use it for this specific question.
bloopernova
Not the parent commenter, but here's my workflow:

Org mode files are stored on dropbox. One file per project, plus one for Personal Stuff.

Android app "Orgzly" is the main editor for those files. I also use VS Code's org mode extension to edit those files sometimes.

Square-dotted notebook is used for daily notes from meetings. + symbol means TODO, bullet point symbol means Item To Remember. + symbols are swept into the relevant org mode files at various times during the day or week. Different colour pens are also used when different projects may get covered in the same meetings.

Personal Stuff gets entered directly into Orgzly, which then forms the main backbone of my Agenda display in the same app.

I don't attempt to sync tickets between the various different tracking systems of different projects and my org mode files.

Longer notes and documentation are written in Markdown and converted as needed using Pandoc.