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

I second this recommendation with a suggestion that has hugely helped me. I have more or less copied the approach to to-do lists described in that book into a Trello board and then – importantly – made it my home page on Chrome.

This accomplishes two things for me: 1) any time I open a new tab, I get a reminder of what needs to be done 2) adding an item or recording an idea to be processed later is just a cmd-t away.

This approach (combined with the Trello mobile app) has made the list so easy to maintain it's almost hard not to use it. YMMV, of course.

I have a rather meticulous program. For starters, I write everything down on a daily log. Thoughts, notes, tasks, everything. I do it with pen and paper because I like writing and it helps me thinking things more thoroughly. Then at the end of the day I move actionable tasks to a different journal which has to-do lists by project. At the beginning of each week I peruse the projects lists and choose tasks to move to a weekly to-do list. This way I have a planned-ahead weekly schedule which keeps me from procrastinating.

I suppose if you can focus on a single project you don't need to go into such lengths of detailed logging. But for me it's imperative to keep detailed notes because I work on multiple projects simultaneously, and I can also keep track of older ideas that might get lost in the mayhem that goes around in my head. The best way to stop procrastinating is to break down projects to single tasks. Then I don't feel overwhelmed by the variety of tasks I have to accomplish. I only need to do a single task each time. I've adopted this system in the last couple of years and my productivity has increased at least 100%.

There's a lot of valid perspectives, but I think its some kind of false reward system. Archiving a link on neural-networks is a low effort task that superficially appears to move you toward your goal of machine learning, whereas the Coursera class takes work (ie. not fun struggling with Octave syntax)

The One Thing is good. It was free to read on Kindle for Prime members recently. The OP should check if it's still there.

The hard part is figuring out the one thing. Tim Ferris talks about this a lot - finding the one thing that makes other things you want to do either irrelevant or so much easier. This concept has lots of names. Jocko Willinks books Extreme Ownership puts it simply as "prioritize and execute".

Anytime I feel overwhelmed with the amount I have to do what I have really done is not prioritize.

And yes, it is not easy and requires daily discipline.

4 text files that go from vague life goals down to concrete hourly tasks:

- todo-year.txt : all goals for the year

- todo-month.txt : track subset of annual goals to finish this month

- todo-week.txt : track all monthly high-level tasks to finish this week

- todo.txt : daily task plan based on weekly plan. Switch tasks every 1 hour. In a day, I plan for about 4 tasks, so each task ends up getting about 2 hours.

Self-employed consultant here who has suffered from chronic procrastination after my daily routine became disorganized and unsupervised for some years. If I focus on only one thing for days on end, I feel I'm not doing much. The system above has helped me reduce (but not eliminate) both procrastination and distractions, and given me some satisfaction that I'm being relatively more productive.