[omarhaneef]

There are three insights that David Allen had with GTD that I appreciate:

- one inbox to absorb tasks you distribute later

- lists go into working contexts so you do them while in that context

- short term and long term are different

The issue I have is that we also have different “recording” contexts. These days I can use an app on my phone, a note in my computer or a notepad in a meeting. I have multiple inboxes that have to be routed.

In addition I think the relationship between project and tasks needs to be fleshed out.

However I think those 3 insights persist across all good productivity systems.

[tunesmith]

It's interesting to me that GTD has so many adherents - clearly there is a wide cross-section of people for whom it works well. I tried really hard for a while but ended up concluding I must be a different category of person. I experienced the following pain points:

- I got overwhelmed by what I was capturing

- Contexts weren't useful at all and only complicated the system

- I had far too many tasks on my list that made me feel guilty for never starting, no matter "when" I would schedule them

The sort of system that ended up helping me was an exhaustive exercise that helped me determine my lifelong values, and how they related to my priorities in terms of actions. Then I could identify my tasks - not as "oh gosh, I should do that too" impulses, but as actions that were actual logical implications driven from my values. I discovered that the large majority of my "guilt-driven" tasks were tasks that actually weren't connected to my values, or could be replaced by other tasks that were a better fit. And I almost never "capture" - I will review my values, and reason from there.

Overall, that worked better for me because then I had a system that gave me a built-in way to say no. From what I learned about GTD at the time, GTD doesn't have that.

[addicted]

Wouldn’t the clarify step involve such decision making? Whether or not you actually want to tackle the stuff you may have captured?

[tunesmith]

No, because the clarify step is applied to everything you capture. If your problem is that you're capturing too much, then it doesn't really help. It sort of assumes you're going to process what you captured someday.

[doitLP]

That sounds a good approach.

Mind sharing how you went about determining your life values?

I always envy those who seem to have a clear cut purpose.

[tunesmith]

There's a business term called MECE - mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. It's just a way to break things down. You can break one thing down into multiple other things, MECE-style. There might be a bunch of different ways to do that, you just pick one.

So for instance, I started with the statement, "I have a happy, fulfilling life." Then I tried to think of the 3-5 things that were each necessary and collectively sufficient, and without overlap, in order for that to feel like a true statement.

It breaks down in a somewhat predictable fashion from there. For me, there was health, financial security, social, purpose, etc.

Then for each of those, you do it again. Visually, I had the "fulfilling life" statement on top, branching down from there. So like an upside down pyramid. As you go down, the statements get more personalized and actionable.

Over the years I've found that the lower levels change more frequently than the upper levels. Like, staying up to date on a particular Anki deck used to feel necessary to justify the statement above it. Now it doesn't.

It's also pretty impossible to always keep the entire DAG up to date and perfectly reflecting all my priorities in my life. Life's too big. (Or maybe I just don't have the right UI/UX.) But doing it once gave a lot of perspective in terms of telling the difference between what's really important to me, and what I thought was important but really wasn't.

[mrkstu]

It’s pretty much the Covey-Franklin pyramid method.

https://youtu.be/E1nw46xcFno

[bitexploder]

The biggest thing for me from GTD is building a system I can trust. It goes in and I can forget about it until the right time. Mind like water.

[ghaff]

I was pretty much the opposite. Going back to Day Timers, I basically don't do systems. But I found quite a few little insights. Break big tasks into actionable steps, if you're sure something will really just take 5 minutes don't put it on a list do it, don't fill up your calendar with todos that mostly won't be completed, etc.

[bitexploder]

It is more than just tasks for me. Ideas. Somedays. Etc. not losing things is important with adult ADHD. There are still only a few important tasks per day, but not losing track of things like “call someone this evening” reduces cognitive load for me.

[ghaff]

Oh. Definitely having lists even if it's for a project I shouldn't forget about though it will hopefully solve itself if I drag it out long enough. Essentially everyone forgets about things that are some months hence if they're not captured somehow.

[cbm-vic-20]

For me, GTD told me that if a task takes under two minutes, just do it now.

[jqgatsby]

and that great acronym: OHIO

[jayant_kaushik]

After experimenting a lot here’s my productivity system that really works for me: Apps I use: 1. TickTick (for task management and short term notes) 2. RemNote (for knowledge management) 3. Sorted3 (for time boxing)

How I use them: I wanted a system where there are a number of to-do lists defined by the work area(I would do all tasks in one work area at once).

I used to use Trello before this but the three board format(to do, doing, done) did not work for me as it only took lots of screen space without simplifying things. I basically just wanted a “to-do” and “done” list on top of each other rather than side-by-side

TickTick TickTick has a beautiful app that is very flexible to how you want to organise the tasks. You have boards > which have lists > which have sections > and also have tags. With TickTick I am able to make the list acts as to-do with check boxes and when we check them, they move to the bottom of the list struck-through. This way I am able to put more lists in one single view related to completely different aspects of my work. Every task that I need to do or anything I hear in a meeting that I want to take action on in a few days, I dump it into TickTick. Then I have different board for Work and Personal (and I those boards lots of lists and within lists, sections)

Sorted3 (iOS/Mac only) It’s a mind blowing time-boxing app where you can schedule your day to the minute. This way I get more done in less time. And then I chill! How I use it: First I mark every task I am going to do tomorrow as “tomorrow” in TickTick. Then I have created a iOS shortcut called “Plan Tomorrow” which brings all those TickTick tasks into Sorted where I assign them a time of the day/sequence while mostly using the auto-schedule feature. And I have the Sorted3 widget on Home Screen so I see all day what’s next and stay motivated to see the work ending much sooner. I have never paid for any app in life but this app compelled me to since it solves a problem no one else could and in an elegant and user friendly way.

RemNote: For storing knowledge for long term use. It’s a knowledge management system that actually works. I never get confused or looking for old info as I have it organised in there.

[ilteris]

That's exactly my problem. After using all these apps I am having hard time routing these into one app and my lists are scattered across different apps. I wish there was a painless and easy way to jolt and knowing it would end up in my master Todo list. But instead I have to think which app list i should be using...

[ajmurmann]

I've been using Omnifocus for to track Todo items and Apple Notes for taking notes. Both sync across all my devices. This has been working really great. Before the pandemic I used physical notebooks to take notes during meetings because it made it obvious to others that I was paying attention to them and valuing what they are saying rather than slacking with someone else. That led to the integration problems you describe and I needed to spend 15 minutes every day syncing things. Arguably that also was a valuable review time that sometimes led to new insights.

[galoisscobi]

I’ve stuck with vimwiki + fuzzy finding for years and it’s worked without any issues. If you’re into vim based tools, and haven’t tried it, I recommend checking it out.

[anonymousDan]

What about on mobile? I've been trying to switch to obsidian because of that.

[galoisscobi]

I'm not big into using my phone for notes. I'll put random stuff in Bear or Apple notes but I take my computer everywhere so I just use that for the wiki.

Although obsidian would also work well with fuzzy finding since it stores markdown files locally. For any rough edges, you could write a Lua plugin for neovim, if you want fully featured vim (I tried out the Obsidian vim mode but it doesn't seem to be feature complete).

[galoisscobi]

I was reading every tool is a hammer by Adam Savage and he also has a variant of short term and long term task lists. He essentially keeps a mega checklist for each project which can have infinite resolution and be as fine-grained as he needs it to be. Then for his daily lists, he pulls in tasks from various mega-lists. I thought it was a neat approach and it’s been fun to adopt it.

[somehnguy]

That’s a really interesting way to solve the problem, and I would like to try it. Do you happen to know if he mentioned any software that operates in that way? I’m imagining many lists, with a nearly frictionless way to say ‘do this today’, and the task moves accordingly.

I’ve tried a handful of note taking apps with checklists, and actual checklist apps over the years. The one thing they’ve all had in common is that they’re too cumbersome to really integrate into my daily habits. I need something that lets me add and adjust super quick to accelerate the actual task getting done.

[nequo]

> I’m imagining many lists, with a nearly frictionless way to say ‘do this today’, and the task moves accordingly.

I think org-mode does this. You can schedule tasks and get org-mode to compile an agenda for you.

[koheripbal]

The issue with this is that you have to pre-schedule tasks across all lists, which means you need to go through all the lists to schedule every item - often each day.

The better way to do it is to set priorities on TODO header items in org-mode. This is far from perfect through because you're still manually setting priorities across all projects - which is very flawed.

[galoisscobi]

Adam mentions in the book that his solution is fully analog. He has notebooks with project lists and daily lists and he manually re-writes tasks when he wants to copy them over.

For myself, I think that’s too cumbersome so I use vimwiki. A sibling comment mentioned org mode and I think that would be an excellent tool to implement this and imo, work better than vimwiki.

[tomjen3]

GTD suggested as few inboxes as possible, and have them reviewed regularly, not keep it to one inbox.

[nunodonato]

One inbox is not a hard rule. You need capture tools in many different places (home/office/car are a few examples). You can even use voice recorder (memos) or similar tools. Its important to note that many updates have been made to recommendations as we move forward in time and tech is more present in our day to day, compared to when it was when the first edition of GTD came about.

Contexts, yes, I just found out that I currently was not benefiting from it. For me, nowadays, its more like "work mode" and "not-work mode". And simple and short lists are working efficiently enough. I don't know, maybe my life just got simpler ;)

[xiwenc]

The apple reminder app(s) work surprisingly well for many cases:

* macbook: at a desk or whenever/wherever it is accessible

* iphone: quick note pretty much anywhere like train ride

* apple watch: running, in the pool, during sauna session or in the gym weightlifting

* siri: while driving car or riding bike

These all end into a single inbox.

Unfortunately this requires full buy-in into the apple eco-system.

[ellyagg]

For a long time this was a stuck for me. I use Workflowy to manage my projects.

Normally, I can trivially capture every note on either mobile or laptop into the root of Workflowy and distribute later as needed. This is already a pretty decent single inbox.

The one leak was capturing thoughts in contexts where typing is not feasible. Ultimately, I landed on using Siri and just jotting notes into Reminders on iPhone/Watch/Mac. When I'm out, I capture notes this way, then at home run a script to transfer the notes into Workflowy.

Here's a hype piece with the script[1]. The page also doubles as an experimental art study of contrasting zero HTML styling with exaggerated ad copy. Hopefully it's pretty dissonant.

1. https://drivingwithworkflowy.com/

[kstrauser]

I have one definitive inbox. Each morning, I go through the other inboxes (email, Slack, texts, etc.). I do the tasks I can do immediately, like replying to an email asking a question I know the answer to. The ones I can’t, I copy into my main inbox.

oncretely, I use Things for my to-do lists, and can easily drag an email into it (or use its Mac hotkeys) to make a Things inbox item like “Reply to Joe about the Foo project”. Once everything’s in Things, I schedule them where appropriate, or move them into projects like “Work > Icebox” to come back to later.

The core principle is that I have one place to look to know what I need to do. This works for me. The other option of having multiple active inboxes fills me with dread and I can’t operate efficiently like that.

[flakeoil]

In the below article [1] is suggested to use your regular calendar app on the phone and then later write it clean into your desktop system, whatever you use.

I like to use one text file per big project and keep all related notes and todo items in there. I also have one text file specifically for meeting notes and its todo items. I also keep random daily things in that file (one headline per day). In case todo items from meetings belong to a specific project I can move them to the project file, if not, I leave them in the one big meeting/journal text file.

[1]: https://easyorgmode.com/blog/working-with-org-mode-on-deskto...

[wahnfrieden]

The biggest improvement to my personal todo systems I’ve experimented with was to quit working for a boss’s vision / to quit taking wage labor where the reward for getting things done is more things to do toward ends that don’t benefit me. Getting value directly from the product of my labor and deciding for myself who I want to work with and how is a great foundation for any todo framework

[marcosdumay]

> The issue I have is that we also have different “recording” contexts. These days I can use an app on my phone, a note in my computer or a notepad in a meeting. I have multiple inboxes that have to be routed.

That's the other large point of GTD that apparently you didn't internalize. It's "don't do this". Centralize those contexts into the same storage, if any of them are on paper, store the papers around the computer where you sort things, if all are digital, synchronize the files.

Unifying the inbox adds a lot of value.