A plain-text file format for todos and check lists

Re:A plain-text file format for todos and check lists by egypturnash on Monday August 22, 2022 @02:51PM (#32555569)

My experience is that physical to-do lists are great for sitting down, surveying what needs doing, and deciding what you’re going to do today. Including decisions like “I did not read any of Anna Karenina yesterday but I still want to do this so I am putting it on today’s list, and while I am thinking about this I took 5s to take it off the shelf and put it by the comfy reading chair”. And things like “laundry is gonna eat 2h of my day today but I need some clean clothes ffs”. And “I have six important work projects and only 3h of actual productive time between meetings, I am going to work on projects X and Z today unless someone comes and screams about the other projects”.

Digital to-do lists are where tasks go to die.

I just keep on coming back to a nice notebook, a nice pen, and my variant of the Pomodoro method.

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Re:A plain-text file format for todos and check lists by olau on Monday August 22, 2022 @04:18PM (#32556655)

I used to do that too on paper, but at some point I ended up opening a text file in Emacs and do exactly what I would do on paper, just in Emacs. It's only a small chunk of text, so I don't use org-mode or anything like that.

But yeah, not accumulating stuff requires a conscious decision and the will to stick to it. The same goes for paper, though. I have a coworker that at some point had a stack of paper over 20 cm high.

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Re:A plain-text file format for todos and check lists by jen729w on Monday August 22, 2022 @03:53PM (#32556346)

> Digital to-do lists are where tasks go to die.

I also am becoming convinced of this.

The issue is that you can keep adding to them. And if you’re the digital hoarder type - hello, my friend Alex! - you can never delete the old crap. So now you have this utterly unachievable list of things that seemed like a good idea at the time. And which have lost context due to time, so now you barely even remember what you meant.

I introduced Alex to Things.app’s feature whereby you can mark a task as ‘Cancelled’. So it takes it off the list, but you’re not pretending that you did it. I hope that helps him.

Me, I use slips of paper and a pencil. On my desk the slips closest to me are those that I’m doing, or should do, now. When there’s too much paper, it’s obvious. Throwing away (by sticking it on the spike) a piece of paper feels good. It’s just a piece of paper.

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Re:A plain-text file format for todos and check lists by kstrauser on Monday August 22, 2022 @04:35PM (#32556856)

I don't even try to follow by-the-book GTD anymore, but a lot of its principles speak strongly to me. In particular, the regular review cycle is critical. It feels great to have a process in place that explicitly grants me permission to delete/cancel the things I don't want or need to do anymore. As a result, I know that my todo list has only things on it that I actually care about.

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