Ask HN: Whats your ToDo's setup/apps/strategies?
Almost everyone here would have some personal setup/apps/strategies for managing todos for both work and personal items. The fact that note taking/ personal knowledgeable management/ task management topics keep popping up so often on HN tells me two things: 1) people are overloaded with information and whatever they used to do is not working for them and they hope that somebody else has cracked it better then them and they could adopt that strategy. The people who didn’t have a system in place also are overloaded and hope that they can use something existing rather then inventing their own “wheel”. 2) whatever todays solutions are they are not meeting the need because everyone has a shiny tool/app/system and none of them are satisfied. 6 months in they are looking for a new “system” be it notion or whatever the latest YouTube hotshot is peddling. I think the reality is that humans are limited when it comes to efficient context switching and hence when it comes to managing todos / knowledge any system that requires human interaction to “manage” it has constraints. So to that effect until we all have AI assistants out system will need a way for us to say no to things so that we can actually manage our system and it in turn can help us be organized and productive. I personally love orgmode but hate the fact there is not mobile support (which is as good as the desktop). As a result I also use google sheets and things. - it’s far from perfect > whatever they used to do is not working for them Not necessarily. It can also mean that people wish for something that just works better. People are lazy. They always want to get rid of work, automate it and don't think about things. And frankly spoken, most people want to have everything, without doing anything for it, especially if the work appears simple and pointless, like managment. On the other side are people also just curious. Knowledge and task management is something everyone here is doing to some degree and which has a low threshold. So many more people can participate and experiment with them, than most other topics here. > 6 months in they are looking for a new “system” be it notion or whatever the latest YouTube hotshot is peddling. Notion is not a system, it's an app. That's another notable point of problem: the focus on apps and the lack of a proper system. It seems many people have no understanding of systematically solving this issues, and are just jumping from app to app, without acquiring a real system. While other jump from app to app, to find something that better match their existing system and habits. > any system that requires human interaction to “manage” it has constraints. Any system has constraints, it doesn't matter whether it needs interactions or not. It doesn't even matter what it's purpose is. There is always a tradeoff to any solution. > So to that effect until we all have AI assistants out system will need a way for us to say no to things so that we can actually manage our system and it in turn can help us be organized and productive. AI won't solve this, either. It only means people will constantly retrain new AIs to make them understand which mood they have today. And the question is whether people will trust AI in the first place, and whether humans have at that point demand for their help. The ideal AI would be something that run's locally and has perfect knowledge of the human. But AIs of that level would be better working on their own, leaving the humans with unimportant work which does not need to be organized extensively anymore. I think it is simply ‘some’ people overthinking things and getting frustrated - thinking tech should be leveraged. Then they overthink the solution. I use Things 3. Not really a strategy beyond a few reoccurring todo's. I'm not very organized, I just put things in that are important, but not so important that I will surely remember. Or things that will be important later. One slightly controversial strategy I have is to just delete tasks that sit for too long. There are exceptions of course, but those are rare. My reasoning is that the longer they sit, the less likely it is they will ever get done, and if they don't get done they are probably not important either. If they do get relevant again at some point, they will resurface organically. Nothing demotivates me more than an endless backlog of largely outdated irrelevant tasks for "someday" that you never ever get to. It works surprisingly well. Apple Reminders organized by list: - To do: Actionable tasks I have chosen to do. - Maybe: Inbox for anything. - Project-specific lists: Projects have a deadline and deliverable. - Goals: High level goals. - Habits: Habits I want to develop and maintain. Each day I review the todo/project lists and choose what to do that day. Each week I review all the lists and make adjustments (mostly refining the Maybe list by deleting things or moving them to do). I’ve got a LOT of different strategies for to do lists… can’t say I’ve found a single one that my ADD hasn’t found a way around. In all seriousness, I use the Reminders app on my iPhone to add personal/work items to one or more shared outlook task lists. That way I’ve got everything in one place. TickTick. A "today" list widget takes up half the screen on the front of my phone. I use repeats a lot, even to remind me of ongoing stuff. Getting the whole list without scrolling is a win! Project, scope, Task, Deadline, Status In google sheets One list for all my tasks prioritized in order