Moleskin + Pen
Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?
231–240 of 291 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?
#232I've been working on a project for the last 4-6 months around managing your books: https://getpolarized.io/ You guys loved it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219960 ... but I'm sure not all of you have seen it yet. Basically you can keep all your books and web pages in one central repository, tag them, flag them or archive them and read them while keeping track of your reading. It also supports highlights, an…
Thanks, this looks like something I've been looking for lately. I'd only wished Polar would also support epub books. I couldn't find a reliable epub reader with annotations support for Windows so far.
Why not just `ebook-convert book.epub book.pdf`?
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?
#233Mental Palace.
Maybe more a mansion than a palace. A villa, really. Well, it's got a roof. Mostly.
Ok Mental Caravan if you really want to be pedantic about it.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?
#234I created a life goal of a happy and fulfilling life, and then attempted to identify the 3-5 necessary subgoals that were sufficient for that, and continued down the chain until I got to day-to-day activities.
I have a whole system for that, but the upshot is that if you find yourself doing something that isn't on the graph, then you have a choice - either update your graph to justify why it's necessary, or... consider not doing it anymore.
Kind of an anti-todo list. Because when I had earlier only used todo lists, my completist nature led me to get overwhelmed with list items. This other system helps prevent that.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Procrastination is fun and complicated. "Just Do It" doesn't seem to help much for me. After reading more I've found a number of reasons for procrastination that may be helpful depending on the cause: Is the task too vague? If so, making it more concrete helps. "Do taxes" is impossibly vague and scary and the brain rebels. "Make a list of all expenses this year" is better but still large. This is the most common actu…
The mind is great at rationalizing excuses. It is about executing. It is about having the discipline to do the things you don't want to do, but know they have to get done. As soon as you start thinking about motivation, you have lost. Motivation is fleeting. Even the most important task that is also fun will likely become a grind before you are done. How do you get it finished? Have the discipline to grind it out. I'…
>It is about executing. It is about having the discipline to do the things you don't want to do, but know they have to get done.
This is just begging the question.
In my experience, coming up with systems that make the good stuff easy and the bad stuff hard trumps discipline in the long run.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?
#236Like many others it seems, I keep lists of things in places I'll have to see them when I need to :
- For work, things to study and technical things : a file I make my text editor always open at launch.
- For "consumption" : a list I keep in my browser's side bar. At this point in time it's mostly made of shirts, displays and chairs I want to look into when it's globally budgeted, and random domestic maintenance consumables.
- For life goals and life events I want to handle, I've got a sheet of paper stuck on my desk lamp. You'd find things like calling some company which billed me an extra 20€ it shouldn't have, getting some bad mole removed or talking to friends that drifted away (having had periods of depression withdrawal, it really hit me that if you keep in touch with people they won't do it for you).
- For entertainment, I've got a text file of things to watch and read on my desktop. And an Amazon list for the more serious literature.
It's not very organized, but I do better when I have a few things to handle within a day and keep me engaged rather than being tunnel-visioned on one task.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?
#237I 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…
I agree with this as well. Reading this book really helped me get organized. Some of the information on it is getting a _little_ bit dated. In particular, it talks a lot about the different 'contexts' you have your tasks to complete, like at home, at work, at a coffee shop, etc. I feel like this holds up a little bit less nowadays, because almost the entirety of all my work can be done if I have my laptop with me. Th…
I believe there is an updated version.
Contexts should be adjusted to make them personally useful - mine are mostly categories like "work", "home", "community group" so that I can sit down and focus on work tasks without seeing other stuff, and then I can spend a solid hour working on my community stuff, etc. I also have a couple place- contexts: "house" for things like fixing a thing, "9-5" for tasks that have to be done during business hours, and if I have travel etc coming up I might sort some stuff into "offline", like reading a bunch of docs I have downloaded.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?
#238Things 3 app shared with my wife.
Group things by category and most things end up there. This is also supplemented by copious use of notepads.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?
#239I 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…
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.…
I think this can be a very good start. Whenever I'm reminded of my tasks deadlines I'd work harder. Would also love to include different color signaling for deadlines...
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reviewing: I review the daily todo every morning and update it every night, and I do EOW and EOM status updates with detailed analyses for the weekly and monthly files. Why could I not finish something? What should I do next month to correct it? That kind of analysis. Moving / Reprioritizing: It's a necessity for me, because unlike a salaried job, I have to balance between my revenue-earning work and my hobbies. I do…
Thank you! I truly appreciate you taking the time to explain all that. I think this system could work for me. I've just added those four text files into a folder, a notes folder, and also found an ios app which lets me easily view and edit txt files via Dropbox. (Textor) So, you review all four files each day? I'm guessing that if the review system is properly done, then daily and weekly files see the most change? I'…
Reviewing: I read all 4 files everyday to motivate, reinforce my memory and also see if anything is off track. It can happen sometimes that I have ended up allocating too much time to one thing and not enough to another. Daily reading corrects helps correct that. I write end of day analysis every night, end of week analysis on Sunday nights, and end of month analysis on last day of the month. Daily file sees the most changes, weekly less so. Monthly and yearly typically change if I get a new idea or drop an idea or get approached with a new project.
Problems with other tools: Writing a daily plan from scratch helps me go into the details of the task for that day. My experience with those other tools was that they were ok for creating a high-level plan once, store it, modify it occasionally and even review it everyday. But the interfaces were not convenient to design a detailed daily plan everyday, which meant a lazy person like me would simply review the plan without much modification, and I'd also lose the history of the project. In my text file, I can easily see if I end up with a long sequence of partial or skipped tasks, and make some corrections, but in those tools I could not.
Done tasks: I just write [DONE] / [PARTIAL] / [SKIPPED] against the task, along with reasons for the latter two. If I accumulate too many partial or skipped tasks on consecutive days, something is wrong - typically I'd have underestimated complexity of some idea - and a correction is required at least in the weekly plan.
My best wishes for your system! Keep at it with systematic self-analysis, and you'll be able to find and correct your weaknesses.