That’s kind of where I have been at for the last few years. Still, I keep wanting to hope that someday I can just settle into a single task management system and stay there.
I do wonder if the switching is actually serving a purpose in and of itself to just have fresh eyes on what I’m responsible for and to leave all the existing current detritus behind. Still, it feels more like buying a new car instead of just giving the old, perfectly working one a good cleaning/tuneup.
This is a very interesting approach and gives me something to think about. There’s definitely something to keeping the task list with the project itself that makes sense to me. Thank you for sharing.
Laughing because I 100% agree. I know the real problem is my brain and the switching is just something I do to trick my brain into “working” again.
Thank you for the book recommendation. I had not heard of or seen of this before and, even better, it looks like it’s on Audible (which is almost the only way I can finish a nonfiction book ).
I’m seeing a lot of recommendations for NotePlan from ADD people here which is interesting. I think I opened it up once when it first came out and wasn’t very impressed so I never dove in, but it certainly looks like the developer has been very active. I will check it out again.
I love Freedom – I ended up buying the lifetime membership because I have found it so helpful.
That’s the hard part. Learning to un-learn the harsh, unkind inner voice that’s always so demanding and impatient. sigh
I’ve also had this thought before because it would eliminate quite a lot of the the clutter currently in any of these systems. However, paper would not work for me – I need something I can check off and then have the checklist automatically reset and I don’t want to carry a clipboard or physical notebook around. In the past, I’ve sometimes had the checklist in a Taskpaper and then had omnifocus just link to an other app that is reading the Taskpaper note, but there’s still problems with this and it actually ends up being quite clunky in terms of linking and clicking through UIs just to get to the checklist.
The more I am writing and thinking about my struggles, the more I am pointed to the possibility that the problem lies with my review process/system. Maybe if I could just figure out a way to make review work, then I wouldn’t be tempted to switch again. I really like your idea of putting a time cap on review and having different review levels. I will think more about this. Thank you for sharing.
I do have Omnifocus Pro and I have tried to make something similar using custom tags and perspectives. It’s almost like, I can’t help diving into a super intense level of detail and soon my custom tag hierarchy reflects everything I actually experience in real life in terms of having a tag for every room in my house and every possible mood and every possible physical location in my city and my task list looks like every possible actual thing I could possibly do with my time. So, the source of the overwhelm is clearly my own head.
The 24 hour cycle is certainly a useful limitation in planning. One thing I have considered is using the time box of a single day and developing a script that would look at the estimates in Omnifocus for each task and let me know how much estimated task time I had allotted to the existing day so that I could compare tasks to available time and use that as a curation tool. Maybe that’s something that I should look into more. I really wish that Omnifocus would allow for some kind of calculating rollup feature where it would tell you this information automatically!
Back in the day, there was a Windows 95 personal information manager called “Above & Beyond.” It had one feature that was kind of amazing and that I’ve never seen anywhere else. I think it was called “dynamic scheduling” and it would visually display your tasks on your to-do list based on their estimated time. Kind of like what we call block scheduling today, except it was more of a fluid timeline that would change minute to minute. If you did nothing, items on your today list (unless they were static, i.e., had to be done at a specific time), would automatically spill into the next day as less time in the day became available. And whenever you started a task, it would visually “pin” the task to the timeline and then turn into a timer that would allow you to track the actual time it took to complete the task. You could pause and return to a task. And tasks could be auto-schedule based on how much time a task required, priority levels, deadlines and whether a task was fluid or static. I feel like ever since I used this software (must have been the early 00’s), I have been trying to recreate this functionality.
“Today” lists are definitely where it’s at…as is figuring out how to objectively box in an appropriate amount of work for a single day.
Good job I like how much effort you put into this post. It seems like you have put a lot of time into thinking about your system and how to make it work for you not changing it but tweaking it. Thanks
What are you doing these days? Now that you are not getting paid. Besides posting on MPU, thank you for contributing here and making it a better place. I’m looking for a new opportunity, I enjoy learning from all of you on this thread and I’m open to ideas. I have listened to MPU for years but I only recently started engaging with the community. I was intimidated because I don’t have the patience to sit down and actually learn from all of you. It is scary for people with ADHD to be vulnerable and talk through things. The more you do the easier it gets.
I learned about Bullet Journaling during a time when I had given up handwriting. I found a way to replicate it in OneNote:
Create a tab for each year
Create a parent page for each month
Create a sub page for each day titled with the date.
On that page, put headings for each topic of concern and bullets underneath for what must be done. OneNote supports checkbox bullets. Check the checkbox with your mouse or Ctrl-1 when done.
Every day, copy yesterday’s page, rename it for today’s date and delete the lines that are already done.
This eliminates the time-wasting (?) rewriting task of BuJo which is no doubt useful for reflection and cementing today’s tasks.
I use this method for work, and it could be adapted for any note taking app. I made a return to handwriting for notes that don’t have to be searched in future.
That old Windows program sounds great. Now I’ll have it stuck in my head that I’d like to try something like that! Ha ha. You’ve clearly put a lot of thought into this and I hope that you find the approach that works for you in the end.
I usually print it out as a double-sided page. I check it off then toss the page when I finished both sides of the paper.
Another thing I’ve done is to have the checklist in an Omni Outliner document or an Apple Numbers spreadsheet. You can also create a checklist with Excel or Google Sheets. You can have one column with just checkboxes. The second column will be your next actions. Check them off as you go down the list. In the end, select all the checkboxes and tap space bar to “uncheck” all the checkboxes.
Having one window with my checklist on one side and my task manager in another window helps me. I’ve also taken to putting the checklist on my iPhone or iPad and referring to that digital device.
Not sure if I qualify to answer, never been officially diagnosed as ADHD but have many of the symptoms on occasion. One thing that made a HUGE difference in my Onmifocus system was to pull out of it all the potential future projects, in GTD terms the Someday/maybe projects and move them to plain text files somewhere else. Orignally in DEVONThink and now in Obsidian. That kept the active working stuff to what I could manage with the review tools in a reasonable weekly review. Part B of that is that whenever I get to a point on a project that I am not going towork on it any more this season (I have projects that span seasons, years and even decades) I try to move it right then back into my on hold or someday/maybe tool. And I review those lists at least 4 times a year.
Set yourself a limit on how much you can put on your focus list. e.g. a Maximum of 3 things at the start of each day.
This is where you’ve got to put your serious head on and be sensible. You can’t have 20 things which are priorities or nothing gets done. Using the “Today” tag alongside anything which has a due date of today will let you see on the Forecast View what is due today and what’s overdue.
This is a reallly good idea. Right now I have quite a lot of tasks in Omnifocus that are in the “someday/maybe” realm and it’s important for me to capture all of this or else it just swims around in my head like flies buzzing. I’ve had the intention of trying to seperate this before as well as the intention of checking out Obsidian, so maybe it’s time to dive into both.
I’m diagnosed ADHD. Really like the thread–a few additional thoughts:
Remember ADD gives you advantages as well as challenges. You don’t need to totally stamp it out, just learn to exploit it well enough that it’s a net benefit to your life.
I’m a fan of not trying to make your task manager do motivational work for you. Just use it to inform yourself about the state of your tasks, just like how you would pull up a folder of Word docs and then pick the right one to edit. Make accessing task information mundane to make the choice feel smaller.
Just like subfolders make documents more legible, more perspectives or smart lists help you understand your tasks. It’s just giving yourself better information. Quick open/quick bars in every app these days make it easier to create more perspectives and keep it manageable (use descriptive names to aid keyword recall.) It’s not a waste of time to create a perspective you only pull up every few months if that’s how often you need to know that thing.
It’s also fine to delete a perspective if it seems to be getting in your way, even if you make it again later. What’s dangerous is feeling like the task system is this pristine thing you can’t prod at and play with unless you’re in a perfect mental state.
If it helps you, it’s really not a waste of time to transfer your lists to a new system. It’s fun and the new structure/medium/environment can help you see your work and life differently and give you new ideas.
To be honest, it’s what works for you, but by tagging these as Someday/Maybe and excluding them from views, they’ll “disappear” then you can look at your Someday/Maybe tag on a regular basis (weekly / monthly) and remove the Tag when you want to bring them into your view.
).
sigh
