Ask HN: How do you organize yourself ?

I tried a lot of organizing tools & apps. what worked for me is a simple ToDo list with two sections "to-do today" with max 2-3 items and "everything-else" section which containers everything else.

Forcing to prioritize & focus on 2-3 items for the day gets things done faster than I imagined.

Simple Reminders app (happens to be Apple's Reminders) with "contexts" -- put in quotes because the way I use them may not be the way the GTD folks do.

I have one list of things to do, simple stuff like "pay bills" "feed cat" etc.

I have sub-lists for every client I'm currently working with, or project I'm working on. I punch in just enough info in to the individual items to jog my memory as to what it was. Often times its something like "read that email" under the "!Client" list.

I have sub-lists for every place I might be where I need to do something while I'm there, i.e.:

@Office for Home @Home for Office @Cabin for Home @Home for Cabin

If I'm at home and I remember I should bring my laptop home because I'll need it this weekend, I put that in "@Office for Home." When I'm at home and I realize I should bring the table saw home from the cabin to use at the house, I put that in "@Cabin for Home," etc.

I bark things at Siri all day and at the end of the day shift things in to the lists they need to be in.

I use Todoist and I try to spend 5 minutes twice a day to review my tasks and block out time to accomplish them.

I like Todoist in that it syncs with all my devices and it doesn't force me into a specific paradigm. I keep a simple hierarchical to-do lists, and I have some of my projects as boards (ToDo/Doing/Done) rather than lists. I feel like it helps me spend less time managing my todo list and more time _doing_ things.

A dated to-do list in plaintext. I find that everything else just complicates things.

I made a whatsapp group where I am the sole participant. This makes it easy to work on my "todo-list" on all devices synchronized.

After many years of using different tools to keep track of tasks, I ended up with a very simple system: a markdown journal for what I do every day.

Whenever I have a task that I need to complete that day, I add an entry in the current day's log. If I get it done, I 'x' it. If not, I carry it over to the next day. Of course, for work projects we have Jira to track work as well, but my task list is for things like "set up meeting with so and so" or "get screenshots to so and so" or "start working on ticket 1234". Any meeting notes or random things I think might be worth recording, I put in the log for the day.

For my personal projects, I keep a LOG.md file in the repo for the project and usually a separate TODOs.md since I don't use Jira or anything like that. As new work comes up, I add it to the TODOs file. I also nest tasks just using tabs. It's super simple, but it gets the job done.

I've learned that I don't like relying on outside software for keeping track of tasks. It's just faster for me to type away using vim in a text file. It gets synced with the repo and I don't need to worry about signing in to some cloud software or worrying about them adding/removing/changing features on me (or going under).

Like everybody else, I use todo lists for the tedious everyday / short term stuff. For all things longer term or more complex, I have a physical SCRUM board (todo / doing / done columns) with post it notes all over it that lets me keep ongoing tabs so projects move along. It’s not ideal but it’s the best thing I’ve found so far.

I tried out a bunch of tools. The calendar, markdown files, todo apps, I tried them all. Nothing quite stuck around.

So I decided to build a tool on my own with help from a friend. Add items to the list board, and they get added to my calendar as and when time is available.

As many have already said in this thread, a simple plain text TODO list is one of the best solutions.

In similar fashion, I also have my week schedule as text file.

RSS reader is also helpful: updates, news, new content - always in chronological order and clearly visible.

Thanks to DuckDuckGo's !bangs I only need to keep only a few bookmarks in my browser, so beside those few, I know every other bookmark is something to-read. Although sometimes I use also Pocket since it's build in Firefox either way.

I regularly check e-mails and delete unneeded ones right away.

Same with files. Not needed = deleted. And I keep them in clear and hierarchical directory structure.

On a related note: I’ve recently become interested in creating a database for everything in my life with the view of enabling digital assistants to do my bidding. Best described as WolframAlpha for your life.

My thesis is: Digital Assistants are limited in their functionality due to not knowing enough about me.

For example I can't say: "Hey Siri, my son has a cough. Please book him a doctor's appointment and ask his school for his homework".

The value of having a structured knowledgebase of my life is only going to increase with brain machine interfaces.

Resources around "personal knowledge management systems", "building a second brain", etc seem to be all around stuffing unstructured data into a system (Evernote, Notion, etc). The "Quantified Self" folks seem to be just stuffing a limited set of metrics in a database.

Would anyone have any resources or materials I can research further on this field?

1, I use Pomodoro within a paid app. It works quite well. It has graphs and other analysis. I don't need Pomodoro in tasks that are overly exciting for me.

2, Todos have no value in my life unless I block a chunk of time for tasks explicitly. I block some time for one task and I do only that thing at that time.

3, No social media outside of a 30 minute window per day. Not even when waiting in a queue, or Pomodoro rest gaps.

4, No-email/Slack blocks of 2 hours each. 30 minutes in special cases.

5, I plan my day the night before.

6, Habit-tracking. I plan to a handful of tasks everyday without fail like exercising, reading, and some work/study related stuff. I use a free app for this which does everything I want.

7, I keep a journal where I jot down my long-term, intermediate, and immediate goals. I like to think that it works.

I have tried a hundred things, and these work well.

I have a few markdown files for work and life.

I have one for "Morning meetings", which is our Scrum stand-up. I also have one for "Meeting with BA", who is our bigest customer. A third one is "Sync with HQ", which we do every two weeks.

In each of the markdown files I simply keep a date and whatever happened during the meeting, and maybe some actionable points if there is any.

More importantly, I try to fill in questions I need to ask in those meetings so when I have them, I can read them out instead of missing anything important.

Frankly I haven't met any good alert app. I have a "calendar" on mobile but it doesn't work as I expected. What I need is: Say I have an appointment on 2021-07-01 13:00:00, I'd like the app to send me a short message (a notification works too but a short message is preferred) a couple of times on 2021-06-30, and again at 2021-07-01 11:00:00. It sounds simple but frankly none of the apps I tried works like that.

I use a self hosted kanboard instance for my tasks or todos. I use zim as knowledge base and journal. I bookmark stuff in a self hosted shaarli instance, and tag things I need to read later with the #read tag. In Firefox a bookmark link takes me immediately to my reading list.

In Fastmail, I make extensives use of labels to be as close as possible to inbox zero. Every email gets a label and gets sorted asap.

This is the results of years of experimentations but this is the longest I've been sticking to a workflow/tools.

Onenote lists for work

Simplenote lists for private

I use onenote with my own crappy markdown to prevent onenote from being "helpful" I do week plans with stuff for the week on top and meetings below . I used to do daily but the issue was that unless I read through each day for the week again nothing stuck. Format is as follows

  Week of May 31
  TASK
  TASK
  01 TASKDONE June 1
  
  ] 1400 June 1 Managed Service Provider Review
  Bob MSP CEO
  Sam MSP Sales engineer 
  Self
  MEETING NOTES 
  \ What SLA do you provide?
  \ Do you have a formal security plan?
  = Action item from call treated like a task above

it's working much better and ensures I don't forget things. Review previous week on Mon and pull tasks forward and provide any critical feedback as required.

Hyperlist with vim plugin, synchronized with git and syncthing.

I can't believe Org Mode[1] hasn't been mentioned yet! TODO list, notes, projects planning, agenda, and more all using plain text.

After running the gamut of existing organizer tools, I settled on Org Mode because it's just plain faster, simpler (but not easier!), and more flexible than anything else I've tried.

Also, all your stuff is just in plaintext files on your computer. Most other solutions require a propriety service, which is not where I want to keep the mind map of my life's work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

[1]: https://orgmode.org/

At work - OneNote all the way. The universal search is fast so can usually find things if I recall fragments / words

Looking to move to something markdown driven in git for personal use though. Most of my tech notes are there already

GTD style in Outlook tasks. I find it hard to record things in there though. I find myself just using my memory or writing in a text file a lot of the time and using the Outlook tasks as a record of the important items.

I've really struggled with this for a long time. I used Excel to manage my tasks, I used emacs (org-mode), Asana, Monday.com, etc...

At one point I got fed up and designed my own Notions-like clone in Django. It supports markdown and a bunch of commands that are very specific to me, mainly around sentence-level tagging so that I can tag everything and come back to tags later when I feel like it. I find this to be the best approach... It's now a mix of bookmarking tool, to do list, and journal all in one.

To get to this point, I needed to really think intentionally and deeply about what my workflow was like. I had to observe myself and ask why I would stop using certain tools or why I would get overwhelmed.

I also had to be honest with myself: being conscientious takes time and investment... If you want to keep up with yourself and everything you're doing, you need to make time to organize yourself. I didn't really do this before.

There isn't an endgame "organized" state.

For folks wandering into these woods, fair warning - you cannot take someone else's workflow, apply it to your way of doing things and hope to reap the benefits.

You can, without realizing it, be in an infinite loop, copying others, till you burn out. There is a reason why posts around organizing thoughts, ideas and tasks have been floating around HN for eternity. Best avoided.

Start with what and why. My way is to imagine that a perfect magical tool/workflow already exists to solve my problem, I just haven't found it yet, then imagine all the ways it makes me better, where and how I will use it, why I can't live without it. Now I have a fairly good way of knowing if this is what I want, does it sound possible or if its a fool's errand.

Only then can I look around for tools and other's solutions and try filling the gaps. I stay away from getting too deep into ready products, they either disappoint, are too flexible or are too rigid.

Personally, I have settled on using many tools (index cards, whiteboard, freeplane, plain text, google docs, excel) using each for what they are really good at, where they are good at. I only use the core features, not the frills, not the unique propositions; makes it easy to replace when they change too much are unavailable or something better comes along. I have a hard either "bulk copy-pastable" or scriptable rule, if a tool supports neither, its just tossed out right in the beginning.

Some people I know like it the other way round, everything in one, familiar, productive tool. Didn't work for me.

Everything.

And I mean everything in Apple calendar: meetings, when to take out the garbage, the next step on whatever my latest hobby project is, etc ,etc.

I learned long ago: “If it’s not in the calendar, it’s not real.”

For everything else - Google Keep.

This might sound crazy but I have one giant .md file with an entry per day with notes of whatever I was working on.

Days are divided with (-) character like:

-----------------

At the start of each day I just write a list of todo's and check them throughout the day.

I then copy them to the next day if not completed.

Have been doing this for several years now. I always keep it open as a tab in the IDE.

Will periodically truncate the file and archive it to avoid getting to big.