Ask HN: How do you organize your life?

Not very helpful advice for any folks with ADHD. We forget to eat, organize parties, go to the bathroom, etc. It is unfortunate but entirely outside our control. There is no "natural way" for me to reach the things I value because my brain is a dragon trying to find more new and shiny gold to horde while ignoring everything else around him. If I leave myself to "natural ways" then I play video games, watch videos, or binge Wikipedia all day.

I'm not sure this is helpful advice for anyone, to be honest. "The goals you think are important actually aren't if you need any reminders or tools to get there!" is a bad take for the majority of people, I think. If it works for you, that's great. I'm jealous that things align that way for you. But I'm guessing that for the majority of people, that isn't the case.

It’s a bit boring but I really like GTD. I’ve never read the book or gone too hard into the “rules” of GTD, but just using Omnifocus for a decade has basically got me into the habit of:

- do things that take less than 5 minutes when you hear about them

- throw things that might take longer than 5 minutes or require deciding something into an inbox

- sort thru it when you have a moment

- have an auto generated list of old tasks that haven’t been reviewed to ruthlessly delete

- have an auto generated list of tasks possible to do today

And that’s about it.

I don’t think it needs to be anything strict or super comprehensive; people are right in saying that you shouldn’t fully plan out your life. I don’t track anything bigger than “vacation” or “user story” as a project, just the tasks/checklists I know I need written down and want to get floated by me when actually relevant.

Partially true. If I will not organize eating I will be hungry. If I will not organize sleeping I will be tired, because I went to sleep too late or can't sleep, because my mind is on full rev.

Sleeping and eating (though a tasty meal can be) are not my goals, but I need them in order to do interesting things.

Among those various ways to "reach it" is organizing things.

> Dont't "organize" your life. Live it!

That's not how it works if you have even a little bit of complexity in your life, which anyone with responsibilities has.

> Did you ever forgot to eat or hug your beloved one and organize a birthday party for your wife / children / whoever?

Some do, yes. And how does one even throw a party without some basic organizations?

But what about the boring parts? Taxes, doctor visits, household, managing finances... Not everyone can afford to thrift through live.

> If one value is punctuality then you will find a natural way to reach this value. >If the Value is your own and it is real, then you will find various ways to reach it.

People call that organization.

> maybe, these goals are not your own goals.

Staying alive and healthy is may goal, I still sometimes forget some duties which support this, because life is more than what is under my nose.

I've done a lot of different things over the years. What I've finally been settling on (though I might change this up a bit because another app I've really liked in the past just updated and might have finally filled a gap I needed):

- Google Drive for file backup/sync. I used to use Dropbox, but how they handle photos is awful. Drive's desktop client is way worse than Dropbox in almost every possible metric, but...

- Google Photos for photos. I pay for more storage in Drive which gives me the room I need in photos for everything. Very convenient not only for cloud access to photos anywhere, but also really good search, and being able to share albums with people.

- Evernote for all my notes. Also for going paperless. (I've been doing a TON of cleaning of my office and being able to get rid of old documents by scanning them to Evernote is great) Nothing else fully replicates all the features Evernote has: OCR of images/PDFs/etc., email to new note, literally the best web clipper, connect to calendar and create/link notes to events, go to note/tag/notebook, etc. It's not the fastest app out there, but generally pretty consistent no matter how much I throw at it. I tried importing my notes to Apple Notes or Bear and they tend to start choking a bit. The best part and one of the reasons I can't leave for anything else: The search is too darn convenient. I can just throw things in and it's easy to find later even if I don't go crazy with notebook/tag organization.

- Apple Reminders for TODOs. Very fast to add things via Siri or text, has just enough smarts to do some natural language setting of dates, just generally convenient to use via my phone or laptop. I don't do anything complicated here, mostly just to keep track of what I need to do in a day or anything I need to do on a schedule like laundry. I might migrate to TeuxDeux at some point now that they've added better repeating TODOs (they were very primitive previously and didn't do what I needed). Or I might migrate to Evernote tasks which I used in the past but had enough bugs at the time I decided to stop and wait for reliability updates.

- Fantastical for calendar, synced to Google. This might change since apparently Hey is working on a calendar? We'll see how that ends up working out.

It might sound like a lot, but it actually is pretty simple and I keep my usage of things simple. Things like basic notebooks in Evernote or just throwing things in an inbox. I don't stuff my calendar full of things, I just use it to keep track of stuff that is happening at certain times (vet appointments, job interviews, etc.) or something I might want to link to a note in Evernote. I've ended up here because of the simplicity of how it ends up working. I don't want to spend tons of time managing anything, so I just want things I can quickly throw stuff into and stop worrying about it.