I’m interested in this as well, and a few of us have been talking about it in IRC on and off. I was using Autofocus for a while, but it doesn’t fit your requirements, and it turned out not to fit mine. I’ve got a system I like a little better now, which I’m trying out on paper. The basic gist is to keep track of two large task pools (short-term and long-term) and pull from them as well as recurring tasks into a short, manageable daily list. Some of the tasks refer to side lists (“read” “call someone”). I’m still working out the kinks, but so far it’s going well. The way I’ve been dealing with tasks chains/subtasks is by just listing the first one, and adding the next after I finish it, but I could also make sublists for those if I needed help remembering what came next.
If we can work together to make something useful to us both, I’d be interested in doing so, but I’m actually inclined away from a system which is sufficiently general to cover two very different work styles (if they turn out to be so). I’d rather have a system which is very good for one thing, and requires very little configuration to do it, than one which is adequate at many things, or requires a lot of configuration to set up the way I want it. (This tends to be the problem with point of sale systems, in my experience.)
I’ve been using something similar to this, I think. I have a whiteboard up on my wall that’s split into ‘long term’ ‘calendar’ ‘every day’ and ‘today’. Long term includes the wishful-thinking type stuff which I move into ‘today’ at some point, ‘calendar’ is stuff that needs to be done at or by a specific time, ‘every day’ is stuff I should be doing all the time like cleaning and mood management. And I tend to re-do the whole board once every couple of weeks or so.
I’m still not sure if I’m using the right categories but this one seems like it has a decent chance of working for me.
I don’t know how much whiteboards cost around where you are, but buying one is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in terms of self-organisation. I’m actually considering buying a second one at the moment because I have too much stuff I’d like to track.
I dunno either. I have a lot of things stretching my thin funds out right now but I’ll think about whether I can fit that. (Alternatively, I wonder how much white board paint costs. I have a board …)
This sounds a lot like org-mode. “Read” and “call someone” are implemented as tags, which can be added to any item, and there’s a command to extract all items marked as “call someone” so you can do all your calls together.
The separation between short-term and long-term tasks doesn’t (as far as I know) exist in org-mode, but it makes a lot of sense. I have a huge wishlist of things I want to do eventually, some of which are partially done, and they drown out the real TODOs. So I need to figure out a way to hide everything marked “long-term”, or perhaps equivalently, export a list of just the “short-term” items.
Yeah. It looked like it might be similar, but poking around on their site I didn’t notice a really good “summary of what using this is like.” I’m not particularly interested in relearning emacs for an organization tool, anyway, though. My ridiculously overscripted program of choice is irssi. ;)
I’m interested in this as well, and a few of us have been talking about it in IRC on and off. I was using Autofocus for a while, but it doesn’t fit your requirements, and it turned out not to fit mine. I’ve got a system I like a little better now, which I’m trying out on paper. The basic gist is to keep track of two large task pools (short-term and long-term) and pull from them as well as recurring tasks into a short, manageable daily list. Some of the tasks refer to side lists (“read” “call someone”). I’m still working out the kinks, but so far it’s going well. The way I’ve been dealing with tasks chains/subtasks is by just listing the first one, and adding the next after I finish it, but I could also make sublists for those if I needed help remembering what came next.
If we can work together to make something useful to us both, I’d be interested in doing so, but I’m actually inclined away from a system which is sufficiently general to cover two very different work styles (if they turn out to be so). I’d rather have a system which is very good for one thing, and requires very little configuration to do it, than one which is adequate at many things, or requires a lot of configuration to set up the way I want it. (This tends to be the problem with point of sale systems, in my experience.)
I’ve been using something similar to this, I think. I have a whiteboard up on my wall that’s split into ‘long term’ ‘calendar’ ‘every day’ and ‘today’. Long term includes the wishful-thinking type stuff which I move into ‘today’ at some point, ‘calendar’ is stuff that needs to be done at or by a specific time, ‘every day’ is stuff I should be doing all the time like cleaning and mood management. And I tend to re-do the whole board once every couple of weeks or so.
I’m still not sure if I’m using the right categories but this one seems like it has a decent chance of working for me.
I would totally do it on a white board if I had one, but no such luck.
I don’t know how much whiteboards cost around where you are, but buying one is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in terms of self-organisation. I’m actually considering buying a second one at the moment because I have too much stuff I’d like to track.
I dunno either. I have a lot of things stretching my thin funds out right now but I’ll think about whether I can fit that. (Alternatively, I wonder how much white board paint costs. I have a board …)
This sounds a lot like org-mode. “Read” and “call someone” are implemented as tags, which can be added to any item, and there’s a command to extract all items marked as “call someone” so you can do all your calls together.
The separation between short-term and long-term tasks doesn’t (as far as I know) exist in org-mode, but it makes a lot of sense. I have a huge wishlist of things I want to do eventually, some of which are partially done, and they drown out the real TODOs. So I need to figure out a way to hide everything marked “long-term”, or perhaps equivalently, export a list of just the “short-term” items.
Yeah. It looked like it might be similar, but poking around on their site I didn’t notice a really good “summary of what using this is like.” I’m not particularly interested in relearning emacs for an organization tool, anyway, though. My ridiculously overscripted program of choice is irssi. ;)