101–110 of 291 posts
Most people think its time wasted but most also never think before they act.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The tiering of goals in the way you've done it is brilliant. Do you consult upper-tier lists when making lower-tier assignments?
That is in fact the core of the idea. I suck at low-level planning. All the wishful annual life goals have to trickle down as concrete daily activity to get anywhere. My mind is excellent at building castle projects in the air and even good at high-level analysis of them using flowery language. What it sucks at is converting all that into concrete steps. That's why I have to explicitly break them down into monthly, w…
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-…
I do the same thing but I keep all of them in a single text file and hide sections with the "fold" feature of vim.
I tried last year to dive deep into markdown and emacs and evil mode, blah blah blah, but in the end the only thing I really needed was the folding feature of vim.
What makes it work for me is folding based on any kind of indent (tab or space) and fold-toggle with the 'tab' key.
The indent folding I use is at 0xRKTFUG[1] and the tab-as-fold-toggle (along with a few other folding items) is at 0x3HS2RD.
[1] https://0x.co/RKTFUG ... and so on ...
I had an epiphany of sorts about this when working on a freelance project with a client who was particularly organized. They had a kanban board split up into Inbox (ideas and incoming features and bugs), Backlog (accepted tasks), In Progress (doing right now), Review (for others to look at), and Complete columns. At the beginning of a sprint, the project manager sat down for about 10 minutes and looked at all the car…
I had an epiphany of sorts about this when working on a freelance project with a client who was particularly organized. They had a kanban board split up into Inbox (ideas and incoming features and bugs), Backlog (accepted tasks), In Progress (doing right now), Review (for others to look at), and Complete columns. At the beginning of a sprint, the project manager sat down for about 10 minutes and looked at all the car…
Appreciate the other books you recommended. I have posted the books that helped me in this thread too.
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-…
I use a 4 file system as well. I keep them in Evernote for easy access. - health: things I need to do to improve my health. It goes from food recipes to medical appointments to exam results. - future: I'm in my mid-forties, so I look ahead with more pragmatism in my eyes. In this file I put the kind of work (or projects) I want to be involved with until retirement (included). Info here serves as directives for all th…
Over organization can kill the spirit. Especially in creative endeavors. Let's say you are working in independent game development. And you alone are responsible for all design, tech, art, music and distribution. Allocating hourly intervals for each task at a set time each day can breed monotony. Rather, when you feel that inner fire to work on the music. Focus solely on that one task for an uninterrupted period of 4…
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-…
This is brilliant! Thanks!
But I'd like to caution people here who are impressed with my system that in the past, I too have been very impressed by other people's planning systems. I have tried a bunch of systems and tools that have worked for others - GTD, Pomodoro, Mind mapping, Trello, Kanban. But they did not work for me, often for minor reasons. The problem was not with those systems, but with my mind. Understanding how my own brain works, knowing its quirks, and using something that gets out of the way is how I got here. Text files and simple command-line tools work and even motivate me, but may not work or motivate somebody else. I'd suggest focussing on knowing your own quirks, and on ways you know can improve your self-discipline. The tools are usually not the root problem.
I would recommend for you to read and implement the organization/productivity system from Getting Things Done by David Allen [0]. It discusses essentially your main problems of dividing up your life into projects and timing yourself. The system also includes sections for putting some of your ideas in an 'Incubate', basically putting it off for another day once you get through what you have. Having a running list of a…
After trying GTD for about 7-8 years, I gave up. I mean, I kept using it, thinking it was working, but I'd look back and ask myself key questions: 1. How often do I stop looking at my lists, because I felt overwhelmed? 2. How often do I need to spend a large amount of time cleaning up the lists? 3. How often are things getting missed? How often am I doing things not in my GTD lists because I couldn't figure out how t…
If you like using systems to help balance out your selection of work, I would suggest looking into OKRs. The book Measure What Matters is a good start.