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How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain

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Re: How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain

#51

Post by puddintane »

I combine this method with a LiveScribe Echo smartpen (Sky edition). This allows me to backup my notes via wireless but also keeps the human pen + paper touch to the notes.

I feel as though I remember things a lot better when I write them down versus typing.

I originally picked up one of these pens for college and it helped a ton with staying on track in class and always having a backup of the lecture that sync'd in an animation to my notes (so i could either play the notes back, or tap at a location and begin playing back from that point).

They have various versions but I would only recommend the Echo or the Sky - the version 3 in my experience only connected to the mobile apps, so on windows/mac you were not able to view your notes (very annoying). However the Sky (Echo with wifi sync) and Echo allowed me to sync the notes to a desktop app which allowed me to export pdf's. I hope they open up PC support for the 3 but after two or so years it looks as though they will never add that as a usable platform.

Re: How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain

#52

Post by tdkl »

Ayaz wrote: post #29

No application I've ever tried has worked for me in the sense that I felt it an indispensable part of my life. In almost all instances, after a few days, I always kept forgetting to use the application. Plus, the overhead of using applications seemed to appear significant overtime. I am now successfully down to a good fountain pen and a clear notebook. It is also part of my strategy to break my device-addiction, whic…

> In almost all instances, after a few days, I always kept forgetting to use the application.

That's why the success is in building habits. It doesn't matter what medium/tool, but the initial habit building process must take place.

Re: How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain

#53

Post by blablabla123 »

riotvan wrote: post #50
ktamura wrote: post #5

Over the years, I've tried many digital to-do lists, including one I wrote myself. Today, I just use a notebook. The trick that I made work is to have two to-do lists: daily and quarterly. For daily, it's simple. I have a variation of the Bullet Journal [1], but interleaved with meeting notes, ideas, etc. But many ideas are bigger than what you can accomplish/benchmark on a daily basis. For those, I have two pages pe…

Do you carry your notebook with yourself everywhere?

Actually for my personal todos I just use a page of paper. I don't carry it around but sometimes I copy some tasks on a paper snippet and put it into my pocket. The very nice thing about the paper list is that it has a limit. So I don't end up having more todos than I can handle.

However for work I like Asana. Paper would be too impractical...

Re: How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain

#54

Post by ThomPete »

ktamura wrote: post #5

Over the years, I've tried many digital to-do lists, including one I wrote myself. Today, I just use a notebook. The trick that I made work is to have two to-do lists: daily and quarterly. For daily, it's simple. I have a variation of the Bullet Journal [1], but interleaved with meeting notes, ideas, etc. But many ideas are bigger than what you can accomplish/benchmark on a daily basis. For those, I have two pages pe…

When I worked at MetaDesign back in the late nineties and early zeros we had something called RedBooks.

RedBooks were most of the work we had done for a specific client printed out in tabloid size bound into a spiral back book and put on a large shelf system.

We also had a matriculate digital folder system with projects, searchable and the same pages as PDF plus much more accessible from your computer.

Guess which one we used the most?

With the RedBooks it was very easy to pull out the book and look through it for inspiration, talk about how we did this or that and so on and with the book we only put in the things that where somehow relevant.

The computer folders on the other hand had everything because, yeah well why not. But what they had in quantity it lacked in human relatable tangibility.

Computers are great when the amount of information become so waste that it's impossible to manually search through it all or if you need to share a lot of your things with other people.

It turns out that for all the great things computers can help us do it still haven't solved tangibility.

Re: How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain

#56

Post by bappygolder »

ktamura wrote: post #5

Over the years, I've tried many digital to-do lists, including one I wrote myself. Today, I just use a notebook. The trick that I made work is to have two to-do lists: daily and quarterly. For daily, it's simple. I have a variation of the Bullet Journal [1], but interleaved with meeting notes, ideas, etc. But many ideas are bigger than what you can accomplish/benchmark on a daily basis. For those, I have two pages pe…

One way to clear out weeds is to start with a new list everyday.

I created a simple tool called Sprint List and I found this method to be very helpful. Sprint List removes all the items from the list at the end of the day. Think snap chat for todo list :)

But currently it's only available in Android as I only created for myself, haha. If you any of you are into it then check this out:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sprintlist.bup...

Re: How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain

#57

Post by nnnnnande »

tdkl wrote: post #52
Ayaz wrote: post #29

No application I've ever tried has worked for me in the sense that I felt it an indispensable part of my life. In almost all instances, after a few days, I always kept forgetting to use the application. Plus, the overhead of using applications seemed to appear significant overtime. I am now successfully down to a good fountain pen and a clear notebook. It is also part of my strategy to break my device-addiction, whic…

> In almost all instances, after a few days, I always kept forgetting to use the application. That's why the success is in building habits. It doesn't matter what medium/tool, but the initial habit building process must take place.

Wouldn't it be possible that the tool might also influence the difficulty in building said habit? If different tools require you to exert varying levels of mental effort only to remember to use them, then then medium/tool might matter.

Re: How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain

#58

Post by jasonkostempski »

rasur wrote: post #44
zump wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An app never works for productivity stuff.

My issue is latency from _idea in head_ to adequately captured somewhere. A book is usually open in front of me with a pen at the ready. An application.. well it depends, but best-case scenario is that it's in a easy-to-switch-to window and is natural to just get the idea down without jumping through hoops. As an aside from a sufferer of ADHD, I think Augmented Reality tech would be a killer platform for an in-place…

A small boost to that workflow is the ability to unlock and launch apps in one swipe but that still leaves the power button, optional pin, and never being quite sure what state the app will resume in. Edit: Forgot to include the animations that run slower than my hand can move.

Re: How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain

#59

Post by winkle »

I'd say this article accurately describes my organizing. I'll start a todo list in Evernote when I get too many tasks. I'll knock of the highest priorities and the rest get forgotten because they weren't "really" important. After a week or two I create another todo list when new "high priority" items come up.

If no one is asking for something to be done, it wasn't really that important in the first place. I have hundreds of todo lists that are unfinished and I'll never do them. But, if someone does ask me for that a year later it just goes on the new todo list.

Re: How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain

#60

Post by caseysoftware »

And you should purge it occasionally.

With Trello, I use the "card aging" feature to see which things haven't been updated or moved recently. Each week, I spend five minutes skimming through the cards, making sure there are due dates if applicable.

At the end of each month, I spend closer to 20 minutes and look at each card and ask "is this still relevant?" and give it a simple yes/no. If it's "no" I delete it immediately.

Those never-ending tasks and wish lists simply go away. It's not like I was going to do them anyway and it's less junk on the list.

I do the same for meetings. None of my recurring meetings/tasks extend past December 31st. After the January 1st, I double check to see which ones I really need and are still relevant and recreate those. The others are already done.

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