Dating Other Task Managers

It's a lot more fun thinking about how you should take notes then actually writing them.

it's amazing how much I just end up using apple notes and a paper notepad every day. everything else ends up being too heavyweight over time

> I've never been able to stick to a routine with a set of daily tasks in the same way he apparently has

Productivity nerd here, so I’m not criticising anyone. But…

Could this be because you simply don’t want to? My feeling is that we’re told that to be Good Productivity Nerds there are these things we have to do. Daily rituals, journaling, reviews … honestly, reading Evan’s post made me feel nervous. Like, when does the guy have time to relax? It’s all checklists and routines. Good god.

I get it, whatever works for you. It sounds like it works for him. But that doesn’t mean it’ll work for you. Perhaps if you haven’t been able to keep the routine it’s because you don’t actually like the routine?

I feel for the author. The space is so wide that an app needs to be either:

- totally customizable, which means a less cohesive UI, or

- extremely opinionated and you have to find the one that shares your opinions.

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I wrote about my (similar) experience a few years ago: https://xavd.id/blog/post/my-perfect-task-app/

Things 3 has bar-none the best UI of any app. It's not perfect, but I surprised myself with how much I cared about that.

it's the Little structural things like loose connective tissue and mild centralization that guided me to what I currently use. At the moment, I recommend it.

I keep a daily journal / log thing. it's really just a monolithic text document that I can dump thoughts onto and not really meant to be accessed as a reference. Somewhere near the bottom (at the end of the last daily chunk) I have an EOD bookmark: `,./`. because I use vim bindings (emacs-evil) this allows me to gracefully jump to the place where I start writing every day. I have a key chord bound to insert a header with the date.

The interesting stuff happens just after that bookmark. I have two classes of thing here:

- a short TODO that represents the 'misc' one-off tasks (get check to irs, rotate tires, call that guy back) - these are things I'll hate myself for forgetting but don't want to stop what I'm doing to take care of in the moment.

- a series of headers representing deeper, longer work, with the URL of a file in that project that's structured mostly like my journal. This means I can break stuff up into subtasks with their own little todos and sub chunks, and I can navigate to those files without leaving my editor (again, vim bindings for goto -file).

The most important part of this system for me is how frictionless it is. `g-f` jumps to the devlog for the thing I want to be working on, `/,./` jumps to the current point of thought, and right below that is the itemized to-do. The thing that makes me keep using it is that it's fun to use - moving around is completely intuitive (to me) and I spend almost no time wondering where to put stuff.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend this specific set of shortcuts to someone else, but I highly recommend starting from the simplest, least opinionated method that works for you and building on it organically. I don't think I would have figured most of these tricks out if I had sat down and said "okay, time to make the perfect thing"

edit: `.,/` => `,./` because I wrote this on mobile and forgot the order.