Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?

Also the mind is masterful at protecting it's ego by making you procrastinate things you think are difficult. You end up not doing them because you _think_ they're hard to do and you don't want to risk it.

Identify when this is happening and just do it. Force yourself to at least give it the 30 minute try and 90% of the time you'll find yourself in the zone and just doing it.

Google Keep with a combination of Labels (area in GTD), Colors (for different status: urgent in-progress on-deck) and pinning.

It's super fast on desktop or mobile to navigate by label or color. Click search, click label or color.

I can view cards in each area very quickly so I can refresh my sense of context.

I limit the number of in progress projects and I focus on completing.

I can share web links to Keep from mobile. That's a good place to dump interesting research that I probably won't ever find time to get to read.

I post ideas and mini Todo lists all the time, just to be it out of my brain.

Cards can have alarms and scheduled date and time. Shows up on mobile and Gmail and gcal

I don't care if I never export or if keep gets sunsetted. Any idea of things to work on are short term, and I would rather pivot to a new approach then get stuck on a massive project list that just makes me feel helpless and unable to complete.

Project lists are for me short term storage.

I don't think anything would be better than Trello for this. Trello is perfect for prioritizing and planning tasks.

To be fair, it's difficult to not see yourself as having when is everpresent in many aspects of your daily life.

I want to socialize, but it's difficult. I want to work out, but it's really difficult. I want to finish the projects I start, but it's almost impossible after a while. Not because I want it to be – so that, perhaps, I could escape the strain of putting in the effort – but because it just is. That's the sad part.

I get what you're saying – "Define yourself as someone who does the stuff you want to get done" – and I'm behind it. You're saying I should behave as if I'm already – the person who exercises, the person who socializes well, the person who finishes what they'd started?

I've tried that before. It worked for a while, but then it always gets to the point where I feel the kind of an existential "meh" – the apathy towards achieving the thing because the thing no longer seems meaningful, even though I realize how much I value it in my head. That's the sadder part.

Ernest Becker wrote about it in The Denial of Death. We all strive towards completing our projects of immortality – the things that memorialize us, the existence of which help us overcome physical death by becoming culturally immortal. People with depression lose faith in the fact that their projects are achievable.

But suppose it's not true: suppose I can actually manage it. What do I do?

I think your problem is not lack of organisation but either lack of action or wanting to do too much at the same time, or both. There are only so many things you can do in a given day/week/month. Hence it's much better to not scatter that time across a wide variety of different activities and just focus on a few key ones.

Having said that, there are always things that pop up that I would ideally like to do at some point. I keep track of these in various lists on my notes app (recently switched to Notion) and sometimes look at those lists when I am at a point where I have the ability or feel ready to start something new.

Having said that also, I believe that good shit sticks anyway.