This is what I've started doing. I have a few boring and long tasks that don't have any urgency but do need to be done from time to time, and they kept getting dropped, for the reasons outlined in this article.
At the suggestion of a coworker I've started scheduling meetings on my calendar to block out time to deal with them, and so far it's working very well.
Todo lists work great! They may not work for everybody but I wouldn't know how to get through the day without my lists.
I use them pretty much like an OS would schedule tasks to avoid the pitfalls mentioned in the article. If a task is 'runnable' it will get its share because I go round-robin along the lists without preference. All this boils down to is some common sense and self discipline.
Yes, when you finish todos you have more new todos. That's the nature of life, it has nothing to do with the todos. If you don't feel like doing stuff, then don't. If you do, use lists. Todo lists are positive because they also contain the (usually invisible, but you can typically show them in most todo list software) list of completed tasks and over time that list will get impressively long, much longer than the one of stuff still to do.
People that are hard to motivate will be hard to motivate whatever tool or gimmick you use. Don't blame the tool for that.
Depends on what kind of lists... while working on projects with hardware, shopping or not near a computer: paper & pen, stuff that has to do with a software project or organizing either a leo file (but emacs org mode would do just as well). I used taskfreak for a while and occasionally stuff things next to google calendar so the NSA has a copy without having to ask me.
Common sense and self discipline--exactly. This is where mindfulness comes into play: self monitoring your status & progress, and introspecting to be cognizant of your motivation. "Am I doing what I need to be doing, or am I distracted?" "If I'm distracted, is there some personal reason, and if so, do I need to take care of that first?" Etc.
I find a bit of meditation while planning my work for the day helps a lot.
A relevant plug, for the to-do list faithful: My brother and I are building a to-do app that helps you organize tasks, monitor procrastination, maintain mindful focus, and track time:
I understand what the author is trying to say, and I've been in that situation where I've mixed small tasks with short and long term projects. I've tried a number of things over the years, but a todo list created with pencil and paper is the most effective way for me to manage my work. It is not a motivational tool. It's not a project management tool. It's simply a task tracking system with very low overhead. Everyone's different, but todo lists do work for me if the items are scoped properly and prioritized.
I do a mix between a pencil and paper todo and a written one. I wrote in OneNote (that enables you to write multicolumns lists), print it, and they add things with the pencil.
I never found a practical software to handle the complexities (whatever they are) of ToDo lists.
I agree. We try many tools in our small team, but the main problem was, that we had to fill in simple steps or small problems and for that were all tools to complicated.
Effect: after a short while nobody use them.
We come back to paper and whiteboard. For own simple tasks we use paper. For team tasks we use a simple whiteboard nearby the coffee machine ;-)
But after a while we had the problem that nobody see what the others have done (end up with too much talking -> waste of time).
We decide an another approach, we didn't write todos, but we write about what we have done. Advert ;-) We create http://teamspir.it to write a log about the daily work.
Effect: Everybody knows what the team member have done and why, because we write our sight of view about the things we have done.
Positive effect was, that we review our work and look what we do right or wrong.
For me it is very motivating to write at the end of the week about all things i have done. It give me a better feeling about how many things are finished. Normally i have a wrong memory about that and i think "Oh god, i did not do anything this week", but this is wrong, when you reflect your work, you see how much you have done.
Exactly. TODO lists work very well on short term tasks. Daily programming tasks for example, that are put on a TODO list and then completed one by one for example.
I totally agree with the problems Daniel is mentioning. After being increasingly frustrated with most solutions available, we created an iOS app that attempts to solve exactly those problems. You tell the app how long a tasks will take, when it needs to be done and how important it is. Our app then selects the tasks with the highest priority for you every day. It's called Finido: www.finido-app.com
I am curious what you guys think! Is it a solution to the problems described by Daniel?
I have never seen someone successfully guess at how long tasks will take and use that as a method of planning. At some point you are dropping tasks off, or adding them to your day which means you are still working with some prioritization system. Save your calendar for time-critical events/tasks, everything else is a list, hopefully prioritized.
I use a hybrid approach of GTD for managing lists and the pomodoro technique ( a task time bucketing system) for execution of tasks. It works well for me. GTD isn't perfect but it does cover many of the concerns that the author has raised.
Using the GTD approach you can minimise the heterogenoous complexity, priority and lack of context problems. Frequent reviews of your lists will mean that your action lists contain work that has to be done, this helps to reduce the effect of the heterogenous priority since you will tackle the tasks sequentially (they will all have similar priorities). Most tasks that have a high priority are not always urgent and can be planned. GTD and the pomodoro technique both have mechanisms for dealing with urgent, high priority interruptions.
I know my post isn't too clear if you are not too familiar with GTD and pomodoro but I just want to briefly illustrate that there are a few approaches out there to help.
Scheduling works for me. Not a TODO list. I schedule what I shall be doing tomorrow and as soon as that's done, I get out of office. This motivates me to start work early in the morning, just to feel relaxed after finishing my work for the day by 11:00, for example.
You bring up a great point that I think the article left out—scheduling the tasks ahead of time before the day you have to do them can help tremendously. For me, that is motivation in and of itself that I can just start the next day with it already planned.
That somehow never works for me. Partially because when writing code you cant always knw how long wil it take (issues come up all the time. debugging can take a while especially if it's a big project and there is a lot of code written by a lot of different people)
Asana really changed this for me. I found that for me, personally, breaking a task in to subtasks with the right level of granularity is the perfect solution to combat inaction. If I see myself avoiding a task, I know I haven't deconstructed it enough.
Once the subtasks are small enough I can happily get working, and I get the satisfaction of marking things "complete."
It also serves as a reality check because I've noticed I tend towards personal scope-creep. I finish a task, but while doing it I add more tasks semiconsciously. Then I never feel finished and I hate myself.
However, if I go back to my asana list, I can reality-check and realize I in fact did accomplish the original task. Then I can consciously choose to continue the new task or abandon it or add it to the list for later.
No, because, (and this is the trick for me) adding tasks and subtasks and planning is a completely separate activity and headspace. When I am doing that, I am in planning mode and I don't imagine how much it will suck to do a task. Just plan.
I use either fargo.io (the super cool outliner) or I use a text file. As I do stuff I move it around or delete it from the list. It absolutely still works for me. :)
I've had issues with TODO list in the past, but settled on a combination of a Kanban board using Trello and Pomodoros, which works quite well so far. If anyone is interested, this is what we're doing:
Each Monday, we pull a week worth of tasks from the Backlog to the Weekly sprint. Each morning, we pull a day worth of work to the Daily goal. We separate Blocked, Actionable and non-Actionable (things that can't be worked on just yet, but aren't quite "blocked". those are usually the tasks that sit around with the rest of the actionable tasks, but ignored because for some reason there isn't much to be done about them). In the end of each sprint, we archive the "Done" list and start a new one. The numbers in the `()` are the estimated time, and we have bookmarklet [1] that sums it up for each list (for when we plan the weekly sprint).
I like your board. I would like to give it a try. Could you explain difference between "Actionable" and "Daily Goal". Aren't all "daily goals" are "actionable" since you transferred them from "weekly sprint" or "backlog".
The "Actionable" list is actually better named "Weekly Actionable". Its the tasks in the weekly sprint that are currently actionable and can be worked on.
The reason we have that is that we noticed that many of the tasks in the weekly sprint aren't always "workable" and delayed for various reasons (waiting for another card to be finished, not relevant until the due date, still need some more refinement/feedback, etc), and that when I was scanning the weekly sprint for actionable tasks I had to keep ignore them manually, and they were just creating noise. They aren't quite appropriate for the "Blocked" list, so we created a separate list for the "actionable" tasks.
I would suggest you to just ignore that list, and see if you the need for something like that really arises with your workflow.
Yep trello is great! I use it too to help me amange all my work. Unfortunately since i am the junior-most dev at my office so haven't gotten everyone else to use it yet. but am working on it. i am sure my manager would love being able to just make a list for all the things that needs to be done and we'd figure out how to do it.
Columns: Ideas -> Planned -> In Progress -> Deployed -> Client Review -> Done (week of x)
Ideas is: for new stories, unaccepted work.
Planned is: for stories the client has accepted as work.
In progress is: for work being currently worked on (also doubles as time tracking).
Deployed is: for stories that have been completed (tested & deployed).
Client Review is: for stories that the client has chosen to accept.
Done is for tracking completed work for that week, a new column is created at the start of the week.
Other conventions used are: Cards are in order, top of the list is the high priority. Blue label for blocked cards, orange for unconfirmed issues, red for confirmed issues.
Another thing used is Trello Points for estimations (a chrome plugin).
Most of the ideas are quite old- possibly enough to be considered 'public domain.' From Daytimers systems to 'getting organized' self-help books, these things have been around since at least the 1970s.
TODO lists certainly can work. I use 2 levels of lists, a long-term list and daily lists. If a daily item isn't finished in a day I copy it into the next day's log entry at the end of the day. I've been doing it like this for around 7 or 8 years now. I combine this with my daily log (vim text file) to track what I've done and what I should be doing.
I don't use the lists to tell me exactly how to do things, but as a way to track what I to be looking at next. I also have status symbols for items. ! means important, P for when a patch has been sent for review but not pushed upstream and X for complete .
TODO lists -don't- work? Maybe they'd work with some mindfulness, context and discipline? The author acts as if David Allen's "Getting Things Done" did not exist. GTD calls for all these things and, at the most basic level, you're tasked with assigning priority to, creating context outlines for and estimating time commitment for all of your tasks during the first time block in your morning.
GTD became well-known because it works. You just have to take the book seriously enough to both finish and internalize it. Difficult, perhaps, for many in the information-age [quick-fix-age]. GTD is a lifestyle versus a system. That's the only way it works.
Software: org-mode is what I use and it's amazing. You can create massive collapsable lists with TODOs, outlines, context with code-blocks that can be set to any language, direct links to files/emails/websites/almost-anything. It's versatility and scope is so enormous that it can be adapted to suite any conceivable need. Like scheduling? Go to a TODO item and CTRL-s (C-s for you fellow emacs users) and a calendar pops up. Select a date, hit enter and it's agenda'd. The agenda can be set up to send you reminders via iCal, Growl/libnotify/Snarl, appointment-mode, Remind, Google Calendar... practically anything!
The problem with these brilliant systems is the initial time commitment where there are no pats on the back (no insta-grata) and no payout of any kind. They're both intricate systems that work like a circuit - if the circuit isn't complete, it is broken.
I made a to-do list webapp with a twist just for myself, and it's been really helpful.
The twist is, every Wednesday, it calculates how many of my goals I've accomplished during the past week, assigns me a grade, and sends the grade to three of my friends, to help hold me accountable.
Don't worry about the design :) Getting something that works is far more important. You can find my email etc in my bio so feel free to send something over or keep in touch.
> I don't like that all my data is in a proprietary format but it's the only tool that's helped me get my chaotic business life under contr
I really wish there were a good task management system that:
1) Supported GTD
2) Is cross-platform (or has an open API).
I've hacked together my own with a combination of my own scripts and the Toodledo API, but their web UI is pretty bad (and even their API is annoying to work with - look up their authentication flow and you'll see what I mean).
I find Evernote works well enough for lightweight GTD. I don't really want anything more than a bunch of lists I can see anywhere, and Evernote does that. It would be better if it natively supported the concept of a "task", but that's not necessary.
I actually began work on that at one point, but decided to stop as "no-one needs another To-do app" -- that said, I'm yet to come across a truly cross-platform GTD app that actually works nicely...
The only to-do list that I've actually used for more than a week is Any.do. I really like how you can organize your tasks vaguely based on time (Today, Tomorrow, Upcoming, Someday). Adding that solves a lot of the author's problems.
Can we get "(for me)" added to the topic here? There's no such thing as an organizational system that works (or doesn't work) for every person out there.
I personally use Taskwarrior[1] for work (because I'm in the terminal all the time anyways), and aside from a couple of edge cases, it's the simplest and most effective thing I've found.
Our group uses a JIRA[2] instance that I've customized the heck out of to make an effective "This is what needs done, grab this if you have any spare time" system. The motto is "No ticky, no worky" - anybody doing anything work related generates a ticket for it. We've got shell aliases hooked into the web service, so anybody can just do a command like:
ja awesomeproject 'Finish work on the gonkulator' inprogress
For home and personal, I'm a fan of Any.do[3], it's a Chrome webapp and native Android app. The Chrome app lives in a button on the top bar for easy access, the Android app stays in the notification pane and shows what you should be doing next, and it has this feature called Moment where it runs you through your pending tasks once a day, and you mark them as done, to do today, or to do later. Great way to make sure you keep visibility on stuff.
Such a disclaimer (or rather "for some people") could be added to almost every lifehack / productivity tip / work habit / fitness technique / etc.
Work at home / in the office / in the cafe / for yourself / in a team / pair programming / standing desks / morning walks / coffee brewing / IDE tools / soylent / fasting / feasting / work-life balance / pretty much everything else.
People make absolute statements of universal truth to pitch their confidence and certainty, but really it seldom applies to more than a small subset.
(I think) This is similar to how you could preface nearly any statement you make anywhere with "I think". My instinct is to qualify everything and I often have to go back and delete the qualification because it pointlessly weakens every sentence. Either that or I notice it after I've already written and cringe at re-reading it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6457261). (I think) It is usually better to let your readers decide which statements are subjective and which are objective.
Well the problem of not mentioning "I think" is when you pretend that "X does not work" while 99% of your peers use it and do not seem to have a significant problem with it. Then the statement makes more sense if you phrase it "X does not work for me" or "You may like X but I don't", since it would then seem that you are a very unique person with a very unique problem.
If you had this kind of statement in other fields, like "Gaming on Consoles is broken", no doubt you'd get tons of people saying that this is wrong, because obviously millions of people have no problem with it.
Making such absolute statements is akin to trolling.
Agreed. There's often a pedantic need to point out some structural "flaw" in a statement and dismiss it, vs. making an effort to gain insight from its message.
"All Cretans are liars" - Epimenides
The logical robot concludes that because Epimenides was Cretan, the statement is a logical contradiction (hah, got you!) and nothing can be learned. A wiser man realizes he should be wary when in Crete.
Consider your example in the context of a HN topic.
^ All Cretans are liars
7 points by Epimenides | 5 minutes ago | flag | 2 comments
Consider your audience: Programmers, startup entrepreneurs, in other words people who deal intimately with logic on a daily basis.
I'd expect this article to be flagged into oblivion, both by Cretans who are not liars, and by people peeved by the obviously incorrect absolute in the topic.
Doesn't it bug you at all when people engage in these kinds of fallacies to further a point, when they should damn well know better?
Would it have really have killed the submitter to reword as "Be wary in Crete" instead of knowingly posting something false? Would it really kill someone who's making an absolute statement, (a knowingly false one, mind) to reword it into something that still gets their point across, is actually correct, and won't lead to endless corrections in the comment thread?
To me, it shows a certain disdain for your reader when bait like this is written.
> Our group uses a JIRA[2] instance that I've customized
> the heck out of to make an effective "This is what needs
> done, grab this if you have any spare time" system. The
> motto is "No ticky, no worky" - anybody doing anything
> work related generates a ticket for it.
Understand that the system you've created implies that someone else has decided that the work is worth doing, someone else has broken the work down into manageable tasks, and someone else has prioritized it. This may work great for employees who need a lot of direction, but starts to break down as tasks become larger and more complex, and the goal is to leverage the knowledge and experience of the person doing the task.
Markovitz is really advocating an approach that works better for employees who are essentially given whole projects to manage, and are empowered to steer the direction of the project overall:
> You might think, “There’s no way I could tell my boss
> that I can’t do this by mid-February.” But I’d argue that
> you have to say no. The CFO says no when the president
> wants to move into a new building or hire new people, and
> the company can’t afford it — that’s part of her fiduciary
> responsibility. You have the same kind of responsibility —
> to set expectations about what can be accomplished with
> the amount of production time you have available.
(edit: Both approaches have their place, given the work and the team. It's important to understand both approaches, however. I see a lot of frustration from employees who want more say in the overall project direction when they're in a "just do what you're told" kind of job. Similarly, some employees really love the ability to focus on the tasks assigned, and not having to worry about whether they make sense from a business perspective.)
Ah, I should probably give more detail there. We operate on a kind of tiering system, technicians, sysadmins, and engineers. Sysadmins and engineers are generally the ones entering tickets, and the technicians the ones working them. Generally, but not always. It works as a good reminder system too for all kinds of assorted tasks that would be easily forgotten.
I think you've made a bad assumption in that only one or two people are breaking down projects into smaller tasks - that's not the way the software is set up, and it's not the way it works in practice for us. Anyone can assign subjobs to any main job, and this happens on a pretty regular basis.
The major bonus is that it allows management to see who has the least amount of stuff they're working on and allocate time effectively. When you've got north of 20 people being managed by 2, and you can tell at a glance who has more free time, I don't think the utility of this can be overstated. It definitely makes our lives easier, and I'd like to think it helps the company make money, but I don't have a good way to quantify that.
> We operate on a kind of tiering system, technicians,
> sysadmins, and engineers. Sysadmins and engineers are
> generally the ones entering tickets, and the
> technicians the ones working them. Generally,
> but not always.
Right. In general, a sysadmin or a engineer ("someone else") decides what should get worked on, and enters it into the issue tracker. The technician is not involved in this decision making process: They just pull tasks and work to complete them.
To pull Markovitz' article back into this, the sysadmins and engineers are (I assume) able to push back on the business, providing a reality-check when plans are unrealistic, and they are the ones he's suggesting should not work off of a simple to do list.
That's exactly what we use. Unfortunately the scripts are full of various hardcoded internal info and I am not at liberty to post them. The CLI tools here make it very easy, though.
I certainly think the idea of using a calendar instead looks more useful, as presented here. It does put you closer to actually DO what is on the list as it includes planning and time considerations. Perhaps a To-Do list is useful not to forget the things you must do, before you actually add it to a calendar. But I often find a pen and paper to be more suitable for that.
Just use workflowy and order your tasks in chronological order for tomorrow. 15 minutes right before bed and you will be efficient as a machine. Be explicit in your tasks, not meticulous. If your daily task has more than 2 levels or more than 5 subtasks, split it up. If it takes more than 2 hours - you probably should split it up. ymmv. And of course take the occasional breaks.
This is for people who do a very wide variety of things and also make a lot of decisions in the process. If majority of your day is in repetitive tasks, might be even counter-productive.
Also, it is not meant as a project management replacement. It's just a to-do list.
131 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadAt the suggestion of a coworker I've started scheduling meetings on my calendar to block out time to deal with them, and so far it's working very well.
I use them pretty much like an OS would schedule tasks to avoid the pitfalls mentioned in the article. If a task is 'runnable' it will get its share because I go round-robin along the lists without preference. All this boils down to is some common sense and self discipline.
Because when you finish todos, you have more new todos, a never ending story. Thats why todo-list are so negative.
People that are hard to motivate will be hard to motivate whatever tool or gimmick you use. Don't blame the tool for that.
I use pen/paper todos. It feels great when I can cross one off.
If something is too large, I break out the task underneath, so I can see the larger goal I'm trying to accomplish but still have workable chunks.
I find a bit of meditation while planning my work for the day helps a lot.
A relevant plug, for the to-do list faithful: My brother and I are building a to-do app that helps you organize tasks, monitor procrastination, maintain mindful focus, and track time:
http://fleur.io
I never found a practical software to handle the complexities (whatever they are) of ToDo lists.
We come back to paper and whiteboard. For own simple tasks we use paper. For team tasks we use a simple whiteboard nearby the coffee machine ;-)
But after a while we had the problem that nobody see what the others have done (end up with too much talking -> waste of time).
We decide an another approach, we didn't write todos, but we write about what we have done. Advert ;-) We create http://teamspir.it to write a log about the daily work.
Effect: Everybody knows what the team member have done and why, because we write our sight of view about the things we have done. Positive effect was, that we review our work and look what we do right or wrong.
For me it is very motivating to write at the end of the week about all things i have done. It give me a better feeling about how many things are finished. Normally i have a wrong memory about that and i think "Oh god, i did not do anything this week", but this is wrong, when you reflect your work, you see how much you have done.
I am curious what you guys think! Is it a solution to the problems described by Daniel?
Using the GTD approach you can minimise the heterogenoous complexity, priority and lack of context problems. Frequent reviews of your lists will mean that your action lists contain work that has to be done, this helps to reduce the effect of the heterogenous priority since you will tackle the tasks sequentially (they will all have similar priorities). Most tasks that have a high priority are not always urgent and can be planned. GTD and the pomodoro technique both have mechanisms for dealing with urgent, high priority interruptions.
I know my post isn't too clear if you are not too familiar with GTD and pomodoro but I just want to briefly illustrate that there are a few approaches out there to help.
1. GTD (http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/gtd-workflow-chart...) 2. Pomodor technique (http://pomodorotechnique.com/) 3. Time boxking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeboxing)
Gives me an excellent balance of rigidness and flexibility. :)
(For context, see my previous comments)
Once the subtasks are small enough I can happily get working, and I get the satisfaction of marking things "complete."
It also serves as a reality check because I've noticed I tend towards personal scope-creep. I finish a task, but while doing it I add more tasks semiconsciously. Then I never feel finished and I hate myself.
However, if I go back to my asana list, I can reality-check and realize I in fact did accomplish the original task. Then I can consciously choose to continue the new task or abandon it or add it to the list for later.
Then when I do, I just do.
This is how our board looks like: http://i.imgur.com/LnD5a5H.png
Each Monday, we pull a week worth of tasks from the Backlog to the Weekly sprint. Each morning, we pull a day worth of work to the Daily goal. We separate Blocked, Actionable and non-Actionable (things that can't be worked on just yet, but aren't quite "blocked". those are usually the tasks that sit around with the rest of the actionable tasks, but ignored because for some reason there isn't much to be done about them). In the end of each sprint, we archive the "Done" list and start a new one. The numbers in the `()` are the estimated time, and we have bookmarklet [1] that sums it up for each list (for when we plan the weekly sprint).
[1] https://gist.github.com/shesek/5185168
By scheduling tasks in weekly and daily blocks, you are factoring in priorities and time estimates into your planning.
The reason we have that is that we noticed that many of the tasks in the weekly sprint aren't always "workable" and delayed for various reasons (waiting for another card to be finished, not relevant until the due date, still need some more refinement/feedback, etc), and that when I was scanning the weekly sprint for actionable tasks I had to keep ignore them manually, and they were just creating noise. They aren't quite appropriate for the "Blocked" list, so we created a separate list for the "actionable" tasks.
I would suggest you to just ignore that list, and see if you the need for something like that really arises with your workflow.
Columns: Ideas -> Planned -> In Progress -> Deployed -> Client Review -> Done (week of x)
Ideas is: for new stories, unaccepted work.
Planned is: for stories the client has accepted as work.
In progress is: for work being currently worked on (also doubles as time tracking).
Deployed is: for stories that have been completed (tested & deployed).
Client Review is: for stories that the client has chosen to accept.
Done is for tracking completed work for that week, a new column is created at the start of the week.
Other conventions used are: Cards are in order, top of the list is the high priority. Blue label for blocked cards, orange for unconfirmed issues, red for confirmed issues.
Another thing used is Trello Points for estimations (a chrome plugin).
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596007836.do
It takes real discipline to implement but you get a better control of your life if you do.
Anyone serious about managing their time is familiar with each of these problems and develops their To-Do list with these complexities in mind.
The To-Do list is dead. Long live the To-Do list.
I don't use the lists to tell me exactly how to do things, but as a way to track what I to be looking at next. I also have status symbols for items. ! means important, P for when a patch has been sent for review but not pushed upstream and X for complete .
GTD became well-known because it works. You just have to take the book seriously enough to both finish and internalize it. Difficult, perhaps, for many in the information-age [quick-fix-age]. GTD is a lifestyle versus a system. That's the only way it works.
Software: org-mode is what I use and it's amazing. You can create massive collapsable lists with TODOs, outlines, context with code-blocks that can be set to any language, direct links to files/emails/websites/almost-anything. It's versatility and scope is so enormous that it can be adapted to suite any conceivable need. Like scheduling? Go to a TODO item and CTRL-s (C-s for you fellow emacs users) and a calendar pops up. Select a date, hit enter and it's agenda'd. The agenda can be set up to send you reminders via iCal, Growl/libnotify/Snarl, appointment-mode, Remind, Google Calendar... practically anything!
The problem with these brilliant systems is the initial time commitment where there are no pats on the back (no insta-grata) and no payout of any kind. They're both intricate systems that work like a circuit - if the circuit isn't complete, it is broken.
Excellent org-mode guide: http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html
The twist is, every Wednesday, it calculates how many of my goals I've accomplished during the past week, assigns me a grade, and sends the grade to three of my friends, to help hold me accountable.
I'm planning to share it via Github soon, at which point I'll share the code.
I don't like that all my data is in a proprietary format but it's the only tool that's helped me get my chaotic business life under control.
I really wish there were a good task management system that:
1) Supported GTD 2) Is cross-platform (or has an open API).
I've hacked together my own with a combination of my own scripts and the Toodledo API, but their web UI is pretty bad (and even their API is annoying to work with - look up their authentication flow and you'll see what I mean).
One recent addition to the set has been a 'simple/tired' list - where I queue mind-numbing renamings etc.
It's useful when I just want to do something that requires no thinking at all (at very start of day or late at night).
Haven't found any better storage system then a .txt file yet.
I personally use Taskwarrior[1] for work (because I'm in the terminal all the time anyways), and aside from a couple of edge cases, it's the simplest and most effective thing I've found.
Our group uses a JIRA[2] instance that I've customized the heck out of to make an effective "This is what needs done, grab this if you have any spare time" system. The motto is "No ticky, no worky" - anybody doing anything work related generates a ticket for it. We've got shell aliases hooked into the web service, so anybody can just do a command like:
For home and personal, I'm a fan of Any.do[3], it's a Chrome webapp and native Android app. The Chrome app lives in a button on the top bar for easy access, the Android app stays in the notification pane and shows what you should be doing next, and it has this feature called Moment where it runs you through your pending tasks once a day, and you mark them as done, to do today, or to do later. Great way to make sure you keep visibility on stuff.Such a disclaimer (or rather "for some people") could be added to almost every lifehack / productivity tip / work habit / fitness technique / etc.
Work at home / in the office / in the cafe / for yourself / in a team / pair programming / standing desks / morning walks / coffee brewing / IDE tools / soylent / fasting / feasting / work-life balance / pretty much everything else.
People make absolute statements of universal truth to pitch their confidence and certainty, but really it seldom applies to more than a small subset.
If you had this kind of statement in other fields, like "Gaming on Consoles is broken", no doubt you'd get tons of people saying that this is wrong, because obviously millions of people have no problem with it.
Making such absolute statements is akin to trolling.
"All Cretans are liars" - Epimenides
The logical robot concludes that because Epimenides was Cretan, the statement is a logical contradiction (hah, got you!) and nothing can be learned. A wiser man realizes he should be wary when in Crete.
I'd expect this article to be flagged into oblivion, both by Cretans who are not liars, and by people peeved by the obviously incorrect absolute in the topic.
Doesn't it bug you at all when people engage in these kinds of fallacies to further a point, when they should damn well know better?
Would it have really have killed the submitter to reword as "Be wary in Crete" instead of knowingly posting something false? Would it really kill someone who's making an absolute statement, (a knowingly false one, mind) to reword it into something that still gets their point across, is actually correct, and won't lead to endless corrections in the comment thread?
To me, it shows a certain disdain for your reader when bait like this is written.
Markovitz is really advocating an approach that works better for employees who are essentially given whole projects to manage, and are empowered to steer the direction of the project overall:
(edit: Both approaches have their place, given the work and the team. It's important to understand both approaches, however. I see a lot of frustration from employees who want more say in the overall project direction when they're in a "just do what you're told" kind of job. Similarly, some employees really love the ability to focus on the tasks assigned, and not having to worry about whether they make sense from a business perspective.)I think you've made a bad assumption in that only one or two people are breaking down projects into smaller tasks - that's not the way the software is set up, and it's not the way it works in practice for us. Anyone can assign subjobs to any main job, and this happens on a pretty regular basis.
The major bonus is that it allows management to see who has the least amount of stuff they're working on and allocate time effectively. When you've got north of 20 people being managed by 2, and you can tell at a glance who has more free time, I don't think the utility of this can be overstated. It definitely makes our lives easier, and I'd like to think it helps the company make money, but I don't have a good way to quantify that.
To pull Markovitz' article back into this, the sysadmins and engineers are (I assume) able to push back on the business, providing a reality-check when plans are unrealistic, and they are the ones he's suggesting should not work off of a simple to do list.
And pageviews sell Ads!
Just use workflowy and order your tasks in chronological order for tomorrow. 15 minutes right before bed and you will be efficient as a machine. Be explicit in your tasks, not meticulous. If your daily task has more than 2 levels or more than 5 subtasks, split it up. If it takes more than 2 hours - you probably should split it up. ymmv. And of course take the occasional breaks.
This is for people who do a very wide variety of things and also make a lot of decisions in the process. If majority of your day is in repetitive tasks, might be even counter-productive.
Also, it is not meant as a project management replacement. It's just a to-do list.