Eric Belltesting: editing on iPad in Koder, will dropbox sync properly? seems like it
It feels like I’ve spent most of my life trying to keep track of stuff I want or need to do. From paper notes to digital lists to online syncing, from ephemeral to Sisyphean to obsessive to mindful, it’s been a journey.
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Finding a system
To-do lists were always a lot of stuff. Writing down things to do, adding to the list, updating the list, reorganizing the list, losing the list, recreating the list. Keeping track of literal or metaphorical piles of notes and notions, in planners or folders or binders or boards.
My personal epiphany came when I was gifted a copy of Getting Things Done, by David Allen, after a particularly quirky but unsuccessful job interview in my temping days before grad school. That book’s subtitle, “the art of stress-free productivity,” held for me the same seductive appeal as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s mythical DON’T PANIC.
The GTD method (with its own schools of acolytes) came with a few distinctly insightful strategies:
- Capture everything. Getting outstanding tasks out of my head so that I just stopped spending constant mental energy trying to keep track of it all. Instead, I could write each thing down in a standard Inbox-like place and then relax, knowing I could predictably find it later.
- Regular review cadence. At the end of my day or so, go through my inbox and file everything into an appropriate list. At the end of a week or month, go through each of my project areas and update or order or just remember what’s next to do.
- Contextual lists. When reviewing or filing to-dos, group them and my broader projects into “areas” of my life. These contexts could then serve as triggers for surfacing relevant projects. For example, “school” or “hobbies” or “workplace”. This aspect of GTD was the most challenging for me, both as a student, and as the world moved into digital tools. My tasks were rarely dependent on physical context, and I could work on most of my projects in any space with a laptop and internet.
- Other pieces of the approach, like clarifying tasks into small actionable steps, or triaging quick tasks from bigger chunks of focus time, were less revolutionary to me at the time but nonetheless valuable.
conclusion thought
Finding a tool
years of iterating through tools to find a balance that works for me In high school it was paper planners, class handouts, and noticing that red ink reminders stayed on my hand longer than blue ink.
In college
flexibility + constraints
many things too much rope (OmniFocus)
sometimes too few facets (Todoist)
too few platforms (Things)
eventually Trello balance, still challenges (cross-board overview)
another key aspect of was to improve my habit-building strategy
initially, I would spend a lot of trying to overhaul my entire system at once, inspiration followed by big bang project rollout
like similar lessons I learned in parallel about building software products (experiment link), the key is lots of small steps and iterations
I eventually realized (shoutout to Nir Eyal, a case of personal-professional cross-pollination) that I needed to start with small triggers and nudges and loops
plan out or not
one small change
(a few coworkers over the years have commented that I’m the most organized person they know, but I still feel the imposter syndrome. This has been such as long slog of one-brick-at-a-time with occasional “raze it to the ground” moments. Admittedly, visualizing my organization system felt like a milestone of holistic thought-through-ness.)
balancing with work tasks
need for harmonious team coordination
personal vs team preferences (e.g. granularity, activity visibility)
team vs company preferences (e.g. designers Pivotal vs devs Jira)
Other insights
Done lists (personal accomplishment visibility, team review visibility). Introduced to the concept while at Viki, not as useful for team visibility later found it surprisingly useful for personal tasks Rather than simply archiving things when I finished them, I could move them into a regular list of done tasks (that might auto-archive itself periodically), which I could see growing and periodically glance at for a sense of accomplishment.