All the ways I do to-do lists

Fri Jun 26 2020

A list of all the different ways and techniques that I use to try to keep track of all the things I want and need to do:

• Keep
  • Medium-to-longform notes.
  • Notes that I think I might come back to more than once.
  • Text, links or images that I want to be reminded about at a specific time.
• Any.do
  • One-off reminders for personal tasks ("Call the dentist" etc).
  • Recurring menial tasks ("Bins out tonight").
• Google Calendar
  • Non-work-related appointments (dentists, school events etc).
• Open browser tabs
  • Stuff I want to read or need to act on in the next 24 hours or so. Firefox for work stuff, Chrome for personal stuff.
• Momentum browser plugin
  • A simple virtual list for tasks I want to do today or the next day.
• Lists written out on paper
  • When I'm trying to hold too many things in my head and just need to get it recorded somewhere for reference.
• Items scribbled on post-it notes
  • Transient one-off work items when I don't have the time/focus to create a virtual to-do. I try very hard to avoid these, but they do creep in.
• Slack
  • Reminders: Anything that comes in via Slack that I can't/don't want to deal with immediately.
  • Saved items: A collection of things that I remember to look at once a year, if that.
  • Draft messages: Messages I need to respond to/haven't finished responding to.
  • Messages marked as unread after I've read them: See above.
• Jira
  • At work I have a personal to-do board set up that I use effectively in short bursts, and then forget about, and then don't use for a while because of the effort it takes to clear it out and make it fit for purpose again.
  • Sometimes I remember to look at all my outstanding tickets, have a mild panic attack, then don't look again for a few weeks.
  • I really hate Jira.
• Trello
  • I have a private board that I use for tracking work tasks. I use the Jira power-up to link to Jira tasks when relevant.
  • Also have several shared boards that are not maintained frequently enough to make them actually useful.
• Emails
  • Opened in their own window: Messages that I don't want to forget about that and definitely need a response/action before the end of the day
  • Marked as unread after I read them: See above.
  • Sent to myself: Usually things I want to read or refer to at work.
  • Snoozed messages: Usually non-work-related life admin stuff that I don't have time to deal with at work, so I snooze emails until the evening, when I'm too tired to care about doing them, so I snooze them until the following morning.
• Outlook tasks
  • When I know a work email needs my attention, but I don't have time to extract it out into any of the other systems I use, I'll sometimes drag it onto the Tasks tab. Where it withers and dies, never to be looked at again.
• Files saved on my desktop
  • Files saved somewhere visible that relate to something that needs doing in a vague-but-still-somehow-urgent timeframe. Every couple of months I will stare at huge clusters of them, baffled as to what they could possibly be or mean, before uneasily deleting them all.
• Sleeping my laptop instead of shutting it down so the currently open windows and tabs remind me what I was doing when I open it up again.

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