Personally, I'm very bitter/blasé toward any talk of todo systems, because the problem most often does not exist at that level.
The main thing for my productivity has been figuring out what I want and don't want in life. That's a big rabbit-hole; to do it properly you need multiple Phd's in psychology, it feels like sometimes. Much easier to just dick around with this or the other Getting-Widgets-Cranked app.
Once you know what you want and don't want, everything becomes much easier. Don't fall into the trap of procrastiplanning, is what I'm saying.
For the most part, it doesn't matter what tools you use if you (1) have developed discipline, and (2) have actually defined what you want to accomplish.
The key hill to climb, where most would-bes are going to fail is at this sentence: "READ THE DAILY LIST EVERY DAY once you sit in front of the computer".
To do that, you've first got to develop the will and desire to accomplish stuff -- and if you had that, you probably wouldn't be fiddling around with the todo-method-du-jour.
As a former member of the GTD and Seven Habits cults, I think the weekly list is more important than the daily list. If you are always heads down focused on your daily list, you will be stuck in fire-fighting mode. Weekly lists provide a chance to balance your personal priorities and see big picture opportunities when you start thinking beyond one day.
I agree about deciding what you do and do not want. I think a really simple, no-frills system can actually help there. There's just no way to spend much time "procrastiplanning" without realizing it. As for deciding what you really want, I've found that reading something on my todo list over and over again brings the question to the front. There's only so often I will look at an unwant item before I realize it's an unwant item.
I don't know what I want in this life. Yet even if I did, I would still need to remember some things.
Right now I need to remind myself to make a blogpost about isospin, make an appointment, look into a trip abroad and settle a money issue. I can't do all of this now and if I did one of these things I would have to take care to not forget the others.
How could I remember that without a good old paper and a pen?
I use todo lists too. I just don't consider them important areas to tweak/optimize.
One productivity product that I did like: The time of your life, by Tony Robbins. But it's very different from GTD type stuff, as it focuses more on figuring out what you want and thinking up smarter ways to achieve the goals. Ie it focuses on desired emotional outcomes rather than specific todos.
Agreed. Same sentiment for losing paper: when you re-write your list, you invariably a) think of something important you didn't have before and b) forget something that wasn't important anyway.
For me, at least, the act of list-making is more beneficial than the list itself.
I love it when people post their todo lists because you can learn something each time. Everyone has a different way of doing it, and inevitably ends up being a combination of a bunch of techniques that are out there.
Right now I have two lists, a "hopper" list where all goals go - it gets filled at the start with everything I want to accomplish that week - and a "do today" list which is populated from the hopper and organized the night before each coming day. Technique stolen from someone here on HN. Simpler seems to work better for me, even though my days are jam packed with multiple clients/projects/etc; I have tried all the notes apps and the complexity adds extra work, time and mental effort that is not worth it in my opinion. I keep my 2 todo lists in a memo on my phone and that's all there is to it.
Hey awesome I have been in the same boat using the Pomodoro Technique where they have an Activity Inventory ("hopper") and a To Do Today List ("do today"). It's just this technique has a process for unproductive people like me to follow hehe.
I actually do find 'todo management' methods to be useful, if only to the extent that they help me figure out what I should be working on right now. When faced with multiple overlapping projects/clients/deadlines, it can be very difficult to keep all this stuff straight in my head.
One of the most useful 'todo system' concepts I have encountered is the notion of 'hiding' a todo item (i.e. keeping it from distracting me) until it is relevant [idea from http://bitliteracy.com/, a book by Mark Hurst]. For instance, I shouldn't need to see anything about filing taxes on my todo list every single day of the year—this shouldn't show up until the relevant time. The OP's method addresses this with the 'weekly' and 'monthly' lists that are read less frequently, allowing reminders to become daily only when they are relevant. The system Mark Hurst designed (http://goodtodo.com) instead allows you to specify a sort of 'start date' for a todo item, and it won't show up until that date. I have found this idea, however implemented, to be very useful in allowing me to get things out of my head and into an organized system, but not let them distract me until relevant.
[Full disclaimer: I have no connection with Mark Hurst other than having read the book linked above and attended one of his talks.]
Hey, I use almost exactly the same system, except that instead of evernote I use backpack (http://backpackit.com/), and instead of the three sections being day, week, and month, I have "Next", "Soon", and "Backlog". Also, I have two todo lists - one for work, and one for non-work.
I like backpack because I can reorder and drag items between lists easily. There is even a checkbox beside each item, which I get an unreasonable amount of satisfaction by clicking.
Clever idea. I'll implement that using a text file and dropbox (specially with Epistle on Android). Every time that I try Evernote on OS X it feels alien.
Thanks for the recommendation for Epistle. I use Dropbox to sync my TODO.txt between my phone, home computer, and work computer. The Dropbox default editor is mostly adequate, but is a speedbump when I just want to jot down a quick note.
I do pretty much the same thing but using simplenote. Simplenote has a lot of clients including one for vim and emacs so it's pretty easy to find one on the platform of your choice.
Here's how my todo list work. Each project directory has an org mode file named todo-project.org. The org mode file has a current product version todo list and a general todo list. When the current version has been released, its list is moved to the bottom, a new version todo list is added.
The general todo list is for things not fitted in the current version. Its items can be done in parallel to the current release list or moved into the next version list.
The Emacs org mode is just a plain text file and make it very easy to organize the todo list.
I love Trello, simply because it's such a generalized way to organize thoughts. I use it for everything from project outlines to detailed to-do, to-read and to-watch lists.
One thing I've found convenient for my high priority to-do card is a script that prints it on to my desktop. Trello already has a fairly solid API.
In my opinion the biggest challenge for to-do solutions is how to stay in the users face all the time. Which is probably why sticky notes on the monitor are still popular.
I use trello in this way too and find it works fairly well.
One gripe I have is that it's a little hard to go back and look at what you've done over the years, at least with the way I do it: I have a To Do (Planned), To Do (This Week), Doing (Today), Done (Week yyyy-mm-dd). I archive the Done list for the week at the start of the next week.
Pulling up done lists for the last few weeks has been ok, but I'm not sure if this solution will scale well.
I'm currently setting up my home away on a shiny new vps (with lots of goals like 'try blogging for the nth time' & 'really migrate away from gmail' being on top).
I discovered taskwarrior [1] and fell in love. So far it's blissfully simple. No syncing (I guess I could easily tack it on though), but I'm on that machine anyway, always (irc, mail, tinkering).
So far it's the most natural interface that I could imagine.
The amount of time i used to waste deciding what to do next completely out-weighted the benefit it provided. Your approach is very similar to mine, love it.
Emacs org mode works great for this sort of thing. I create a different agenda file for each project where I keep todo's and general notes for the project. I can then do a C-c a t to view the global list of todo's. Org mode can also be combined with the calendar to view items by day / week, etc. I'm still new with it so I'm not a guru, but so far it works great.
My to-do list isn't so detailed (but it is LONG), though my appointment planning is. I use Calcurse so I can manage both in the same terminal.
http://www.calcurse.org may be worth a look if you have to manage appointments along with your to-do list.
It's fascinating that despite all the to-do apps, people still resort to home-grown, highly manual solutions. Do people think there will eventually be an app that works for the masses, or will planning continue to be a personal, isolated experience?
a) It's extremely hard to make todo list app that accommodates all workflows that people want well. For example, RTM is not that well suited for GTD, but wouldn't you expect each of the most popular to-do list app to be well suited, for, you know, the most popular todo-ing method?
b) Sometimes manual steps are the point - rewriting list actually gives you time to review the items, so some people opt out for paper and such. I usually use RTM, but, for example, one-off packing lists I do on paper.
is anybody else disappointed with evernote's minimal todo features. I think that if they include an special todo note with some of the remember the milk features, evernote would serve as a superior todo note medium
The main thing for my productivity has been figuring out what I want and don't want in life. That's a big rabbit-hole; to do it properly you need multiple Phd's in psychology, it feels like sometimes. Much easier to just dick around with this or the other Getting-Widgets-Cranked app.
Once you know what you want and don't want, everything becomes much easier. Don't fall into the trap of procrastiplanning, is what I'm saying.