Systems are better when they're an augmentation of your memory that you can appreciate. For example, I always put events in my google calendar so I can remember when they are and catch overlaps early.
I've had a bad relationship with todo lists. They get stale really quickly. If I look at a todo list that's a few days old, I might think, "Why should I do that now? Why should I factor the work in this way? Just so I can say I'm done with this item?" In practice, the way I factor a task changes constantly. So now the way I do todo lists is more like an aid to my memory. When I have time to do stuff (which is rare) I'll write down the things that are most important at that exact moment. Sometimes I'll skim through todo lists from previous days to jog my memory, but I won't copy over everything. I'll arrange the things into an itinerary for the day and see how many of them I can get done. Usually it's not all of them. And that's OK.
"Screw you (me). You don't know what now is like. This is a priority now."
The ego is a tricky thing to navigate...
> "But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
> So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is."
I think your ability to navigate the ego can be trained.
This section spoke to me in the same way, as each time I a new system up (or an old one back up) it works until I have to deal with an emergency day, where even the act of updating the list goes out the window. And then, the next day it's "hey, I made it through yesterday, I don't need that system today." and then it's done... until my emergency is "holy hell, I have no clue what's on my plate for the day/week/month, I need to fix that." where I'll pick up my go to old system (kanban style Trello board) and repeat the cycle anew.
If someone reading this feels the same and would like to hack together something like that, let me know and we could try it together.
I've been coming up and using various GTD systems for a better part of the last two decades. I'd be slipping in and out of different setups, tools, solutions, systems... Some would stick for years, the others I'd abandon pretty quickly.
All of them worked for me to a degree, and were very helpful in keeping me organised and efficient, but never did I find a perfect setup that I'd be perfectly comfortable and happy with.
I guess the most useful thing I learned from all these years and years of trying to get a system in place and trying to get organised is to be perfectly comfortable with changing the systems as I go along. Keep experimenting. Keep what works for you, discard what doesn't.
For a long time I've been using a combination of a Trello based implementation of a GTD-gone-wild kind of a todo list (with the centerpiece being week-by-week daily todos) and an Evernote based journal that I kept surprisingly consistently almost every day for years.
A few months ago, I got in one of those overwhelmingly busy crises, which made me drop the journal. Rather than daily, I'd do it occasionally. To an extent it was a relief, and I rationalised the hiatus by thinking in terms of the benefit from the valuable extra time that I could spend on other work, but I quickly realised that I lost an important information repository I could comfortably and consistently rely on.
And then I stumbled upon Roam Research (RR). The experience was so great that I started keeping a daily journal again. Went from 'nah, I'm not writing shit' mode to an almost obsessive 'gotta record everything' in an instant. And I'm actually enjoying it.
I've ditched Evernote (I still have all my old data there), and I did not think twice, cause I got used to evolving my system without looking back if I find something that i feel works better.
At the moment I'm still using Trello for tasks, but the todos are so easy and natural to do in RR that I'm increasingly using it for my tasks, and finding that I am having to open Trello less and less.
RR is so powerful and flexible and natural and easy, that I am genuinely excited about a prospect of evolving my next system on it. I have a sense this one will stick for a while.
There's a very helpful article on Medium, written by a guy that's quite serious about getting the most out of RR. I'll try to find it and link it below.
- https://nesslabs.com/roam-research
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22104366
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22085837
Personalny I just use git repo with markdown files and Bash script miss.sh to quickly send/get new content to central repo
It's been one of my better attempts at trying to circumvent the 'scorched earth' leaving of the task management process.
The mechanism you describe is what is the basis for the "Getting things done" framework. You learn your brain to "trust" the "authority" so it can let go of all loose ends that keep your brain busy (like stuff it needs to remember, like appointment, paying a bill, fixing something in the house, etc). But if you are able to trick your brain in not checking in with the authority (as GTD dictates) you are left with a lot of spare room in your brain to think creative, at least thats my theory.
I use a typical kanban wip system (Backlog, Today, Blocked, Done) to organize pretty much all task-related things in my life and it works extremely well. Once I know its on the trello board, I know I don't have to worry about keeping it in my head anymore, and that gives me a lot more space to relax and not worry things are being missed/forgotten.
This is key. I don't care if I miss a few weeks because of being lazy. I know my life/future/path/journey is ready to start again when I get tired of being disorganized.
The trick is not to let the notes and calendar act like a "master". I usually view it as a friend who suggests things to do in a given time frame. The friend(calendar with notes) and I are symbiotic, our interests are linked.
Changing the view from an "authoritative master" to a "benevolent friend" would help. Sometimes I would discard the note and keep binging youtube video/or hackernews. Other times, I would reschedule the work for some other time. But most of the time I am able to get things done on time, without any help.
It does require some discipline, but once you get a hang of it, it becomes easy.
This is even more effective if it's a weekend, and I'm drinking.
Weird.
I do have a large trail of systems and nothing has worked permanently. However, I’m nowhere near as unfocussed as the author of that article. That one section resonated however.
Yes, there are systems that don't work. And yes, the dynamic by which they don't work tends to resemble the scorched-earth dynamic mentioned.
I've been keeping a Bullet Journal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Journal) for several years now.
I'll be the first to admit that I maintain it inconsistently, skipping days, weeks, even months. Much as I have with other paper-based planning systems.
But, and this is critical: the bullet-journal method facilitates for me at least returning to the system. That is, if I take a hiatus, I'm not confronted with pages-on-end of blank, unfilled dates as with a pre-printed planner.
I've seen some people suggest omitting the index, and can only say from my experience DON'T DO THAT!!! It's the most critical part of the journal, as it lets you find things. That's what distinguishes the bullet journal from a simple sequential notebook without an index. Everything else -- bullet notation, brief-vs-long notes, spreads, etc., builds off the index IMO.
The flexibility of the system is fantastic as it suits my highly ideosyncratic needs. Sometimes a day needs a dozen pages. Sometimes I really need to make a spread. Sometimes I'll just have a few notes, or none, for days on end. There's no pre-printed form I'm fitting into, I just make what I need (or skip what I don't).
And again: if time goes by and I don't use it, I can re-start.
I've been looking at other systems, some covered in Getting Things Done (which ... took me nine years to read, just sayin'), including the notion of 43 folders, a tickler file. Not yet implemented, but after looking at ring / circular buffers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_buffer), I totally grok the concept.
I've recently started a journal-based research/reading journal based on a similar concept of "BOTI" -- best of the interval -- pages.
Rather than Starting a List and Simply Letting It Grow, the BOTI is either time- or space-constrained. You add to it, and when completed, open a new page, later in the journal.
Individual items on the BOTI aren't
You can also skim the top items from individual BOTI lists and create a next-higher-aggregation BOTI, the best of the best. And so forth. So you might have BOTW, BOTM, BOTY for week, month, and year. Yes, rolling weeks into months is inexact, this is not a precise system.
(Dev-Ops and sysadmin types will recognise this as similar to an RRD aggregation, and the idea borrows from this.)
And "best" can be multiple categories. I'm thinking of books, articles, authors, and ideas, but you might include, say, wines, beers, films, components, devices, or anything else that has a wide range of properties and quality levels that are otherwise hard to track with time.
The handy thing is that at the end of a year, you have a way to easily list out the top items of a year, or decade. Or should the Singularity arrive any time soon[1], centuries and millennia.[2]
I've also been accumulating a collection of index cards related to research interests, now approaching a decade old. That's also proved an interesting journey.
One thing I'll point out is that recordkeeping and planning tools require both time and space. Your journal, your files, your index cards, need a place to live. If you're living a highly disrupted or mobile life, that can be very hard to arrange. I tend to find physical systems far superior to digital ones, for numerous reasons.[3]
And no, I'm not expecting any one system to solve All My Personal Organisational Failings. But there are systems which have been used and evolved over time, there's a certain amount of sheer technique and practice to many of them, and operating within a loose but supportive structure really can help.
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Notes:
1. I'm not especially convinced it will.
2. Or, rather than travelling through time, you might dig back through past history and identify notable exemplars of whatever classes you're interested in tracking from the past. Or, converting time to space, a BOTP -- best of the place -- tracking faves associated with location. The concept is readily extensible.
3. Distractions (or freedom from), format durability, media stability, and privacy are key among these. But just the psychology of having tangible physical media, as well as the freedom from Someone Else's Notion of How to Arrange Your Brain seems also to matter a lot.
The section on why notecards and todo lists have never worked for him (and for me) was particularly salient:
"The problem with "systems" is that they are authorities. They have to be. If you decide "I'll prioritize things with a stack of notecards" then you are telling yourself the following:
"The notecards replace my own brain. Everything that I do must be on a notecard. If it isn't on a notecard, it can't be done. If I want it done, it has to be on a notecard."
The problem is that when you have a crisis (a day full of emergencies) that forces you to break from this system you will lose all respect for its authority. Your brain will learn that it doesn't have to respect the notecards, that they aren't in charge, and this sense of freedom is addictive and will persist. Most ADHD sufferers have left a trail of systems - notecards, whiteboards, lists, post-its, apps, alarms - that worked great for [a month, a week, three days] but are now dead to them, scorched earth we can't return to."