This is why, after a lot of experimentation, I decided to stick with paper as well. All of the other alternatives bring significant friction and other downsides, with very nearly no benefit to me.
I hadn't seen that before, but I kind of like it. I keep a stack of blank index cards on my desk for writing down lists of priorities and things and they end end up with them scattered around. Restack them up and review priorities, consolidate, and things like that on occasion. A binder clip to keep some with me and organized would be nice. I have a notebook I keep with me, but end up with lots of clutter and flipping around without the ability to toss old cards. May have to experiment with it some.
Oh, wow! I started using that in my university days (2002) as notebook for classes and eventually for everything else, didn't know it was ever a thing. It just made sense, given how much one-side only printed pages I had laying around. I also tried a crud bounding with twine for more stability but figured a second clip on the opposite side was enough and saved me the effort of punching holes. I also reused an old moleskine notebook cover which was just the perfect size. It still lives today, now as my ebook reader cover and a few blank pages. With a rubber band, it can also fit nicely an securely a pen.
Yeah, if you only need to write down a few lines of tasks every day, that's lovely for you, but to me this reads like a dude commuting to work on a bicycle telling a semi trucker that he doesn't need that big engine.
I also prefer just a txt file or pinned Keep note for todo lists, but I maintain about a dozen different lists, and not everything gets done. Occasionally I will do an audit and remove things.
Are you just in a scenario where you have absolute control over what you do and on what timeline?
If not:
Do you ever lose track of older items (i.e. forget about them for a long time because your eyeballs don't land on them)?
How do you decide when to remove something that isn't done?
Alternatively, if things never enter the list faster than they leave, how do you predict whether something will or will not violate that rule at entrance time?
My problem with paper is that I can't keep up with paper. I will lose it several times a day, and inevitably, I will lose it permanently after a year or two. I need the sync and findability that an app on a device affords.
This is unrealistic. If I didn't accept TODO items older than a year, or even five years, I never would have built my fence, fixed my stairs, set up my home lab, learned iOS development, digitized my family's old photos/videos, or innumerable other things, because for each of those things, I had 10 to 100 more mundane but more time-sensitive/higher-priority things to do.
You can manage long-term lists without losing items to the abyss by using prioritization techniques.
I feel that you're being unrealistic, not the parent poster: Turning every aspect of your life into a jira ticket straight up isn't healthy (I'm using "jira" here as a stand-in for "any process management system, digital or physical"). I don't feel that writing yourself a reminder to "fix stairs" is normal or a desirable process. At best: This feels similar to a CEO writing a jira ticket to "make website faster"; you've brought an unactionable outcome into process management, rather than the specific actionable steps (e.g. a shopping list).
I feel fixing stairs would be very actionable though, and something that I'd not remember other than when it almost fails under load or fails entirely.
I personally don't need a reminder to go off for a thing I need to do today or tomorrow, but something happening next week or next month that I need to check up on or arrange. Those tend to be the kind of expensive and really annoying thing to fix after neglecting
15 years ago while resisting the smartphone shift I got myself a passport case to use as a combined wallet and portable notebook to write things down in. It worked reasonably well and certainly had some robust advantages but honestly so do cross-device syncd apps that I've used since smartphone adoption.
I hate those cases, but yes, synced todos (including grocery lists!) have been the killer app for smartphone use for me. Still, once I got my S20 this year I stopped doing it as much because the thing is too damn huge to be worth it. I've gone back to using a moleskine and it's fine, but just one more thing to carry around.
I rarely need to. The things I'm writing down have a shelf life of at most one week. I also draw pictures and diagrams which you can't grep anyways. The Tops brand Steno Pad has been a feature on my desk for the last 30 years. If you use it linearly it's somewhat self indexing and going "back in time" to find things is much easier than you'd expect.
You can't delete stuff from the middle of it; You can't write stuff at any random place at any random time and have it appear in your workplace; cutting and pasting involves actual scissors and glue...
Paper is a lot of extra work for the only gain to pretend you are doing something simple.
I sit here at my desk with post it notes scattered everywhere, organizing my thoughts and things to do for the day. Something about being able to physically move them around and cross things off just makes it easier for my brain to work.
The problem with this workflow is getting it into the apps that I use to organize my life. These change from time to time, but Sunsama is the clear winner for me at the moment.
PostIt has a great app to use your camera to organize your notes.
I've also found that Apple's FreeForm has a fantastic feature for scanning. Over the weekend I scanned hundreds of old post-it notes of mine that I was trying to declutter, yet some of them had important thoughts that I wanted to stash for later. I used Freeform to scan all my notes.
Next up I'll try feeding this to a model and see if it can organize my notes and create action items from them.
Come to think of it, I could have done none of this and just organized the notes by hand while scanning them :)
Maybe I should try turning my computer off next time and just thinking before I do something.
I have tried various ways to deal with organizing thoughts and tasks, and always end up spending too much time trying to optimize and make the system better when I do it in a digital way. For me, it seems like it is better to just disconnect from the electronics and do it by hand.
There's only one method of doing to-dos that has worked for me. This method can be used with paper, Obsidian, Apple Notes, or any other app.
Every week I create a weekly note, and write my to-dos for the week. I may add more items to it during the week. If any items didn’t get done I roll them over to the next weekly note or drop them. That’s it.
I usually write my to-dos from scratch without looking at the previous week’s list. This helps me decide which items I should drop. If I can’t remember a to-do it probably wasn’t that important.
Also NotePlan (on the various Apple platforms). Can go by day, week, month, and year, with files stored in a directory of markdown files.
Edit…
I just looked at Tweek, it seems more similar to TeuxDeux, than NotePlan. But NotePlan seems more like what the grandparent was talking about (at least in my interpretation).
Ihave a simple “note” on my iPhone and I do similar thing with, I reevaluate if I really need to do it and if I do I roll it over, otherwise it gets deleted. Between this and my calendar list, I try to simplify lol
Writing notes only on paper in a properly secured notebook is about to make a big comeback as more and more people realize that it's fast becoming the only way to prevent AI/ML from indexing and leaking their original IP to the corporate world. Sending an email or making a social media or discord post is fast becoming the best way to snitch out your ideas to random unknown parties and IP thieves.
I have heard it is also how NSA secure their personal passwords, they keep them in a little black book because there is no scalable attack to get access to them at rest.
I'm not and never have been NSA, but I nonetheless have a sordid past with what is arguably a related line of work. This is how I manage my passwords.
In environments where regular rotations are required, I print off a new "biscuit" via `(date ; pwgen $PWGEN_FLAGS) | lpr`. I then append to the candidate password something of a personal identifier that only I know.
And because a little black book might be carried in a pocket and potentially misplaced or stolen, some teams use a system of small self-adhesive pieces of paper, each with just a single password on it, that are attached to the front of the PC. This in turn is secured by a cable lock to the desk.
It’s legal to have one login to a top classified computer and save your lower classification passwords there.
A few coworkers identified which systems allowed us to re-use passwords, fixed passwords, non expiring reset passwords, etc. warning signs with the password on the back too.
At work I do it daily, and also have a notes section. That way I can go to any day (in Obsidian’s calendar) and see what I did that day if/when needed. I also have a fresh scratch pad each day instead of a giant tab in my editor that holds onto things for months or years without context. Reminders kind of work as well. If I’m doing something today that needs follow up in 2 weeks, I pre-make a placeholder note for 2 weeks from now with the to do, and when I get to that day I see it.
It took me about 15 years trying every tool and system under the sun, and then I stumbled across doing this organically based on what I felt I needed. It’s been going good for several years now, which is something I’ve never been able to say before. That said, I’d be lost without the calendar view, it’s very helpful for me.
At home, I tried this, but it’s too granular. I tried weekly, that even seemed too granular. I’m at the point where when I feel like getting some stuff done, I make a list, and keep that list until it’s done (or things age to the point they don’t matter). Then some time goes by until I need another one.
I've tried many note taking methods, including paper, and none of it really fit my needs. So I wrote my own application, just for me, with nobody else in mind. It's perfect and I recommend everyone to do the same.
I tried to keep a simple table in Apple Notes and it got frustrating, fast. Couldn't control formatting and it would randomly change font sizes. Looked at alternatives and was confronted with more complexity - looks like notes are just the entry point to mindmaps/braindumps/network diagrams of thought processes. Creating a table in Markdown is even less fun that creating it in Notes.
I tried but I can’t figure out how to call the compiler on my hand-written notes.
I actually think it would be really interesting, if I could point a camera at my notes and somehow have it spit out a Matlab code or something like that. But I’m not sure how it would work. It would need to understand at least that the things in the brackets are sub-matrices…
Listing the simplest apps, down to Apple Notes as complicated has got to be a troll.
I'm sure there are people who prefer paper for good reasons. But there are no reasons with justifications listed here. Just a very short personal opinion.
Paper is good if you are solo. I tried Notion, waiting inside the grocery store 30 seconds for it to boot up or load or update or whatever on mobile, gave up on it for day to day tasks. Google Keep is still king. Am I going to be able to consistently pull down a text file from a server on mobile? How will I share a paper shopping list with others?
What cheap hosted service should I be using that lets me CRUD my text files on mobile + desktop and share with others?
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 447 ms ] threadBonus: the handwriting is searchable.
I mean, how do you organise all that paper??
I get shit done.
Are you just in a scenario where you have absolute control over what you do and on what timeline?
If not:
Do you ever lose track of older items (i.e. forget about them for a long time because your eyeballs don't land on them)?
How do you decide when to remove something that isn't done?
Alternatively, if things never enter the list faster than they leave, how do you predict whether something will or will not violate that rule at entrance time?
If an item has been on your TODO list for years, it's most likely not worth doing anyway.
Might as well lose the paper upon which the item is written.
This is me.
Skill issue notwithstanding.
You can manage long-term lists without losing items to the abyss by using prioritization techniques.
I personally don't need a reminder to go off for a thing I need to do today or tomorrow, but something happening next week or next month that I need to check up on or arrange. Those tend to be the kind of expensive and really annoying thing to fix after neglecting
And sure, if you feel like you forget or cannot distinguish between important things for any reason then a different method is fine too.
I think their point was specific to to-do lists which usually aren't around for that long and in my experience rarely need to be searched.
"I can't turn my paper into a Vector DB to build a RAG pipeline and connect it to a voice chat so I can "talk" to my notes" :'D.
Paper is a lot of extra work for the only gain to pretend you are doing something simple.
You might use it just for a day or two, but something clicks in your head, you find your workflow, and now you’re able to use more specialised tools.
But as soon as you need automation, it’s a different story. I couldn’t rely only on paper notes to keep track of my work.
Obsidian has been very useful to keep track of my list of tasks and report what I’m doing. I would spend much more time doing all that with paper.
Details of my setup at https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/07/16-obsidian-contractor/
I sit here at my desk with post it notes scattered everywhere, organizing my thoughts and things to do for the day. Something about being able to physically move them around and cross things off just makes it easier for my brain to work.
The problem with this workflow is getting it into the apps that I use to organize my life. These change from time to time, but Sunsama is the clear winner for me at the moment.
PostIt has a great app to use your camera to organize your notes.
I've also found that Apple's FreeForm has a fantastic feature for scanning. Over the weekend I scanned hundreds of old post-it notes of mine that I was trying to declutter, yet some of them had important thoughts that I wanted to stash for later. I used Freeform to scan all my notes.
Next up I'll try feeding this to a model and see if it can organize my notes and create action items from them.
Come to think of it, I could have done none of this and just organized the notes by hand while scanning them :)
Maybe I should try turning my computer off next time and just thinking before I do something.
Every week I create a weekly note, and write my to-dos for the week. I may add more items to it during the week. If any items didn’t get done I roll them over to the next weekly note or drop them. That’s it.
I usually write my to-dos from scratch without looking at the previous week’s list. This helps me decide which items I should drop. If I can’t remember a to-do it probably wasn’t that important.
The only thing that remains the same is the header has 'yearly goals'.
It's easy and I can jettison the previous week's unfinished tasks (hey they didn't get done so were they really important?).
Edit…
I just looked at Tweek, it seems more similar to TeuxDeux, than NotePlan. But NotePlan seems more like what the grandparent was talking about (at least in my interpretation).
(It also creates snapshots that roughly show if the list is growing much faster than things are being done and signals I need to shed load)
On-demand RICO says hello, https://westworld.fandom.com/wiki/RICO
In environments where regular rotations are required, I print off a new "biscuit" via `(date ; pwgen $PWGEN_FLAGS) | lpr`. I then append to the candidate password something of a personal identifier that only I know.
A few coworkers identified which systems allowed us to re-use passwords, fixed passwords, non expiring reset passwords, etc. warning signs with the password on the back too.
s/ideas/canaries/
https://canarytokens.org/
At work I do it daily, and also have a notes section. That way I can go to any day (in Obsidian’s calendar) and see what I did that day if/when needed. I also have a fresh scratch pad each day instead of a giant tab in my editor that holds onto things for months or years without context. Reminders kind of work as well. If I’m doing something today that needs follow up in 2 weeks, I pre-make a placeholder note for 2 weeks from now with the to do, and when I get to that day I see it.
It took me about 15 years trying every tool and system under the sun, and then I stumbled across doing this organically based on what I felt I needed. It’s been going good for several years now, which is something I’ve never been able to say before. That said, I’d be lost without the calendar view, it’s very helpful for me.
At home, I tried this, but it’s too granular. I tried weekly, that even seemed too granular. I’m at the point where when I feel like getting some stuff done, I make a list, and keep that list until it’s done (or things age to the point they don’t matter). Then some time goes by until I need another one.
Now I just track my blood pressure on paper.
I actually think it would be really interesting, if I could point a camera at my notes and somehow have it spit out a Matlab code or something like that. But I’m not sure how it would work. It would need to understand at least that the things in the brackets are sub-matrices…
I'm sure there are people who prefer paper for good reasons. But there are no reasons with justifications listed here. Just a very short personal opinion.
What cheap hosted service should I be using that lets me CRUD my text files on mobile + desktop and share with others?
I usually send a picture of it to my partner.