To do, or Todoist…
Posted by Qrystal on October 11, 2007 at 20:26.
Category: Tools. Tags: GTD, task-management, web 2.0.
I am pretty sure that what I hate most about making decisions is the possibility of being wrong. I’ve been worrying today that my choice of Task Management App might have been the wrong choice, but I can’t quite put my finger on why. Every specific reason I’m coming up with isn’t quite right, because there really IS a way I can do the thing I’m trying to convince myself I can’t do. And every other app I’ve looked at today has been either too cluttery, too simple, not “Web 2.0″ enough, too limited of a free version, too tacky, too kitchy, too tooty…. /sigh. I’m running out of adjectives and starting to grasp at straws, and that ain’t funny.
I think my problem is that I haven’t pinned down exactly what I’m looking for in an app… and I haven’t really refined my system enough to really tell if Todoist really does what I need. Specifically, I haven’t even used the one power that I was so excited to have: tagging. Tags are incredible, and I can put multiple tags on each item in Todoist, so why am I not using them? I started to use them for contexts, since they are, after all, accessed via the @ symbol. But I was forgetting to tag some of them with context, and some of them I just couldn’t contextualize. For example, what context would I need to be in to mark homework assignments? I could technically be anywhere, at home or on campus, or some coffee shop halfway in between. So, since I its context was essentially @anywhere, I decided not to specify one. In the end, it seemed that most of my things didn’t really have a context, and so I wasn’t really making use of that context well at all.
A seeminly unrelated problem was that I was annoying myself by having either too many things to look at at once, or not enough. I had a huge list of projects, grouped by headings like Personal, Health, Friends, etc., and each of those “projects” had just a handful of items in it. In order to figure out what to do next in my day, I would generally have to look through everything, and get overwhelmed at it. I started to miss the idea that I would only have to look at the Next Action… but I never really got into that GTD stuff anyways, so how could I be missing it? Aaarrrgggggh.
So I’ve been simmering in doubt and digust, not to mention feeling like crap because of some stupid “hey it’s cold out” cold, while struggling to find something that answers all of my problems. Oh yes, I didn’t realize it at the time but I now know it’s true: I was looking for the magic pill that would cure my suffering productivity. Meanwhile, I was making myself sicker by wading through webs of apps that almost, but not entirely, failed to be that magic pill. In the name of productivity, shall I procrastinate some more!?!
All sarcasm aside (for now), it’s after hours, blogging away my sorrows isn’t interrupting my productivity.. it’s only interrupting my weekly online gaming obsession, which is perfectly fine. Oh, I got reminded just now that I should be packing, and of course I would know that if I was able to tell from my dang to-do list! /sigh
I should get to the point, of course. The point is: I need to stop fiddling, and get to Getting Things Done! And I think part of my problem is that I’m not making the concepts work into my life well enough. How do I need to distinguish between whether I should be working on one task or another? It’s not all location based for me, so what if I made it more frame-of-mind based? Is it possible that I haven’t been taking the concept of context literally enough? Or too literally? Maybe just not personally enough. I know I’ve googled for ideas on how different people use contexts, and I haven’t found much help there. The next step (that I never took) was to use my own creativity to come up with something that worked for me.
I came up with a few contexts that might actually work for me: @work, @home, @play. There are lots of projects and other tasks @work, and lots of projects and tasks @home (meaning, not having to do with work but not exactly play either), and there are lots of tasks I’ve been meaning to take on recreationally, hence @play. This might help me get rid of those projects-that-aren’t-really-projects. I can also label anything that I need to do @campus with the appropriate tag, and anything that needs to be done between campus and home can be labelled @out. Hmmm… but what about things that are work related, but have to be done at home, because that’s where the items for it are located? I’ll have to smooth it all out, and post back here when I have. I’ll also keep mulling over Todoist, and really try hard to not freak out over every puzzle I have to work through in order to get GTD into my life.