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by bbminner 606 days ago
For years I have been fiddling with the idea of a personal task management system that synchronized status, due dates, prioritization, planning, projects, etc across platforms, and came to a conclusion that nothing beats a flat text file (with own notation for all the above) synchronized well across devices via something reliable yet lightweight like google keep, that I "scan, update, reorder" at least once a day.

One huge insight was a notation to keep track of blocked tasks (usually by other people) and what/whom to "poll" periodically to check the status.

5 comments

I pay for Todoist because all the other synchronization stuff requires my attention or somehow is not supported well.

Ideally I would like to have git available on iPhone and Apple tablets then I could use my repo that I have notes in on laptops and android phones.

Well I am pissed by poor text editing on iPhone anyway so I will go back to android and then I can go back to text file with git on private repo.

> Ideally I would like to have git available on iPhone and Apple tablets

I'd like to introduce you to Working Copy

- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/working-copy-git-client/id8966... - https://workingcopy.app

This looks great but... to work with a github repo I have to give:

* read and write access to ALL gists

* read and write access to ALL repos, public and private

* read and write access to SSH public keys

That's a no from me.

For me, I want it all in one place: the calendar. Even for stuff that just need to get done but doesn't have a particular "date" -- that stuff could just float from day to day somehow.

It has never made sense to me that Apple has a separate "Reminders" app that's completely divorced from the Calendar.

I don't want stuff in multiple apps. I tend to disable notifications very aggressively because otherwise my phone is "dinging" every few minutes. I would prefer that all my notifications for tasks/due dates/appointments come from the Calendar.

Getting things done (GTD) has a notion of “waiting for”. Lots of people successfully follow GTDs structure methodologically.
I’m not much of a productivity system guy. But GTD has some good ideas that I’ve tried to adopt:

Breaking down tasks into actionable steps

Separating things out that really have a firm due date from those that really need to be taken care of but not by a specific date

I also keep a maybe someday list of things that may never happen and may outlive there being a good reason to make happen. I did what I liked to refer to as a value renovation project on my house this summer and there were a number of projects whose cost and/or effort just exceeded their utility.

In my own markdown-driven workflow with tool support (https://github.com/coezbek/rodo) the solution for me is to only look at tasks relevant today and just move blocked tasks 1 or 7 or n days into the future so they show up again then.
> and came to a conclusion that nothing beats a flat text file (with own notation for all the above) synchronized well across devices via something reliable yet lightweight like google keep

Checklists in Apple Notes also works well for this if you’ve already bought into that ecosystem. I only wish it could track list items, so I could get basic stats on velocity.