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

best thing for GTD.

Good question - made me revisit my memories.

TLDR some aspects were a progression, but the planning part was something I had to try out over a year to convince myself that I finally have something that works.

I'd say I have always done the daily todo all my professional life. Started it as my daily work plan when I was a salaried employee. Only tracked work-related tasks with it, but it was necessary because I had multiple project responsibilities and deadlines then. I actually thought of myself back then as a very disciplined person.

Even the life goals thing is something I have been doing from my salaried years. An annual document where I wrote details about my career wishes and personal improvements for the coming year. There were plans in those docs, but they were rather nebulous and not tracked.

That system worked ok for my salaried life. But when I became a consultant, things fell apart. When I had client projects to work on, my work-life balance became terrible, I missed project deadlines constantly, missed out on hobbies, and felt stressed and demotivated. When I did not have client projects, I went the other extreme - making lots of plans but terribly distracted and not finishing anything. Until then, I had not realized just how much of my earlier discipline was not because of me alone, but actually because of the structured and supervised environment inside a company. When I went alone, much of my discipline disappeared, and along with it, my self-confidence. I had actually refused lucrative client projects because I wasn't confident of meeting any deadlines.

I tried many planning systems over those years. GTD, Trello, Mind mapping tools. It's taken me a lot of self-analysis, experimentation and tweaks to understand why I had planning problems, and what I should do to overcome them. The main evolution between the system I have now versus the system I had back then is that all life goals now trickle down into concrete hourly tasks. While 2015 was a terrible year professionally, this system helped me improve my situation in 2016, and more so in 2017-2018. It's working out for me, thankfully.

I use my own system dubbed NL0 (N = Now, L = Later, 0 = Never). I keep a Trello board online with these 3 columns, and once in a while I clean it up (maybe once every month, but it's not a rule - whenever I feel like it). I also write things and ideas on paper, but, eventually, I sync it all up in the Trello board (I also have Trello on my phone, so, it's usually around when I need it). The [Now] column is for things I need to do / learn now (highest priority); the [Later] column is for things that I need or would like to do / learn later, in the medium-term future; the [0 (never)] column is for things that I am sure I won't do / need, or things that represent no meaningful value (for me) anymore, including things from the other 2 columns. It's been working for me for years now.

P.S.: I keep talking about things that you need to "learn" / "do". Actually that sums up everything we do in our lives. We either learn something or we use what we already learned. Keep learning, keep doing!

NL0 4ever! :)

At the very least, I have a list of priorities that i HAVE to get done in one place. Anything else I have to do, I do categorize but I'm not worried about getting to them. If I make this any more of a system, I'm worried I turn my life into work so this is good enough for me.

>GTD is agnostic about the quantity of work you take on.

Which makes it only a partial success. I disagree that it is agnostic. It does recommend you evaluate it - it just doesn't give any idea how.

I'll look at the other resources - thanks.