Paper and pencil/pen.
Ask HN: What do you use to track your todo's?
21–30 of 34 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you use to track your todo's?
#22I wrote a thing for this!
https://github.com/josefdlange/doit
To be fair, I don't use it anymore because I'm a disorganized wreck (but that's just a personal problem!). Despite that, I think it's a neat tool. It was inspired by Zach Holman's "Boom" -- and its Python port, "Bam" (credit goes to Ben Tappin for Bam). It borrows a handful of code from the latter for data persistence in particular, and for the scaffolding that the CLI rests upon. Thanks Ben! I haven't updated it in almost two years but it serves its purpose when I choose to use it.
I wrote it because I found that switching context away from my terminal was detrimental to my workflow. My day-to-day work has since evolved from being buried in a tmux session, so it doesn't really make sense for me anymore.
Feel free to contribute to it, file an issue, or generally bitch about it; it was honestly a couple-hour job to play around with creating something from a nascent idea, and with learning how Python / PyPI packaging goes. I'd love to revisit it and improve it if there are reasonable issues/features worth fixing/implementing!
Re: Ask HN: What do you use to track your todo's?
#23Index cards and a pencil. I organize the cards into columns that represent calendar weeks (Thur-Wed), and I keep the next six weeks' worth of columns at all times. There's an additional column for "future" that holds everything with a date more than six weeks away.
Stuff that doesn't have a date, but is a nifty idea to do in the future, gets put into a stack of future ideas. They're categorized. At any given time, I'm working on just a few ideas. When an idea is finished, I can take a new idea from the "future ideas" pile. In practice, I often know what I want to work on next and I don't look at the pile.
Cards are estimated in terms of points. I know from experience how many points I can get done in a week. At the beginning of each week, I count up the estimates on the date-sensitive cards. If there's extra time available, I either pull forward cards that need to be done in the future or bring in cards that will progress one of my current ideas.
Every day, I completely clear my inbox. Spam, no-response, and quick-response email gets taken care of immediately. Everything else gets turned into a card and put into the calendar. There's enough slack in my weekly budget that I can absorb these sorts of administrative tasks.
When I finish a card, I mark it with a little sticky dot. At the end of the week, I bundle up the cards with a rubber band and put it in a cardfile. I also add up the total estimates and write down the ideas I was working on for future reference. That info gets put on another card, of a different color, that acts as a sort of "cover sheet" for the bundle. I don't need to do this, but it makes me feel a sense of progress.
Been doing this for years and it works very well for me. It breaks down when I travel as I'm (a) busy and distracted, and (b) don't bring the cards with me, so I have trouble staying on top of my inbox.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use to track your todo's?
#24emacs org-mode, sections with the date and [/] and subsections with the TODO tag, moving things forward as needed; sort of a cheater's GTD.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use to track your todo's?
#25WorkFlowy
Same here
Re: Ask HN: What do you use to track your todo's?
#26Taskpaper. There are vim, atom, emacs, and sublime text plugins to support the format, but I use the official Taskpaper app. I also have a handful of scripts that I use to help manage the file, including an any.do-like daily review in a terminal (i.e. find all the overdue stuff and for each one, prompt to either mark as complete or assign a new due date or delete it; same with @today and some others). I use a separate file for an inbox, and part of the daily review is moving each of the inbox tasks to an appropriate project list in my main tasks file. I use IFTTT and the DO Note app to append new tasks into my inbox file, and I have a couple other triggers set up (for instance, a Github project of mine will drop a task into my inbox when a PR is opened to go review the PR -- this is much less distracting than an email notification or similar).
Re: Ask HN: What do you use to track your todo's?
#27Well, no one mentioned Bullet Journal: http://bulletjournal.com/
They've already done a good job explaining the system, so I won't do it here.
I used it when I was still in graduate school writing a paper. I managed to track tons of tiny details in the writing process.
I think the most useful thing is the task migration. You must migrate unfinished tasks from today's log to next day's log, manually. During the migration, I sometimes cross out some random thoughts that I put as tasks.
This is the time that you _must_ spend everyday. It somehow can keep up your sensation of completeness. I know some apps can help you do this automatically, like todoist, but I don't think that really works for a long run (at least not for me). I find that if I didn't do the review (migration), I intended to get slow start the next day, and gradually the system would collapse. That's how I failed todoist :(
Just my 2 cents.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use to track your todo's?
#28Zim-wiki is very good for general note taking and simple todo. It's worth to try.
Highlights: * Markdown to visual in real-time * Create pages and tags link between them * ! Back links, where a page or tag is being referenced * Past images * Drag drop file * Save storage is in folders files * Python plug-ins
It looks simple at first, but is actually very powerful.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use to track your todo's?
#29I use a simple .txt file always open in Sublime!
Then try http://zim-wiki.org/
Before I was also using notepad++ with 3 text files TODO.txt NOTES.txt and INBOX.txt always open.
And AutoHotkey shortcuts to print date time and \n\n /---=== 2016-04-04_09-50_2016w14 =========----/ \n\n separators
Re: Ask HN: What do you use to track your todo's?
#30Professionally I use Jira, there's really notting quite like it.
Personally I tend to use Google Spreadsheet, it allows for collaboration on small teams.
Sometimes I use a plaintext file in a git-repo (usually formated as a markdown or org-mode file).