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Anti-procrastination Hacks: Dynamic Unordered Todo List

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dr_andus:
Anyone else have any tricks they use to avoid procrastinating?
-mouser (June 30, 2017, 04:16 AM)
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Check out WorkFlowy or Dynalist, as it sounds like what you're describing is what those two services make their key feature (besides having some other goodies that enhance the experience, such as having a dark theme or being able to zoom in on one task at a time, add notes to an item, tags etc.).

One downside of an ever-expanding list is that while it may help you get ideas out of your head (and thus not forget them), it may also compel you to complete tasks that maybe should have never been done.

Also, an ever-expending list can become a source of anxiety, as it may suggest that there are more tasks than time etc.

What I have learnt from capturing all my todos in WorkFlowy for years is that now I have thousands of items that I know will never get done. It just brought home to me the fact that the name of the game is not "what to do" but "what not to do."

So the main problem is the quality of the judgement involved in prioritising. It's all too well to capture, list and order all tasks. But the main issue is to decide what to do now, today, by making very painful decisions about what not to do, temporarily, and most likely permanently.

The pain comes from the fact that maybe your superiors are forcing you to do the things you prioritised not to do, or you have to delegate them to others, who will in turn resist or cause grief in other ways.

Any tendency towards perfectionism adds another layer of pain. Part of the judgement is also about how well does the task really needs to be accomplished, as any improvement towards perfection costs time and energy. I think the solution is called satisficing.

I guess what I'm getting at is that while tools for listing and organising and managing are important, ultimately the capability to make good judgements about prioritising is what separates super successful people from those less so. It's quite possible that those possessing such superior judgement skills might get by with a pen and paper notebook.

And of course if one is lacking in the judgement department (like yours truly), then that person might be particularly susceptible to getting carried away with various software tools for to-do lists, instead of honing the judgement skills.

With that, I'm placing an order for OnTask. Many thanks for the tip, @wraith808.

P.S. Actually I tried to create software versions of OnTask in the past, by combining Samurize and Desktop Coral to create a strip on the top of my screen with the todo tasks, as well as a list that shows up as my wallpaper. But it was too tedious to keep them updated, and they either cut into the screen real estate or got covered up by other windows, so eventually my eyes just glossed over them.

IainB:
...It just brought home to me the fact that the name of the game is not "what to do" but "what not to do."
So the main problem is the quality of the judgement involved in prioritising. It's all too well to capture, list and order all tasks. But the main issue is to decide what to do now, today, by making very painful decisions about what not to do, temporarily, and most likely permanently. ...
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-dr_andus (July 02, 2017, 05:36 AM)
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Yes, an elementary truth that is not always easy to perceive.

The solution that I learned from a book on time management (I forget its title - I had borrowed it from a friend and returned it), some years ago, was to categorise/prioritise tasks into permutations of Urgency (criticality) and Importance:
A - Urgent and Important.
B - Not Urgent, but Important.
C - Neither Urgent nor Important.

A, B and C are mutually exclusive. Cs may become Bs and Bs may become As. Misjudged As can be demoted to Bs, but it seems unlikely that Bs will become Cs, unless one is working in total chaos.
This scheme disregards the logical 4th permutation: Urgent, but Not Important as it is a nonsense.
This scheme seems to have been based on The Eisenhower Method, which uses the concept of Immediacy (to express Urgency).

The way to work the ABC prioritisation is to concentrate on what is Urgent or likely to become Urgent - actioning the As first, maybe picking up some Bs as one goes along (if a B synchronises with the As and is likely to become Urgent and is not a diversion), but otherwise leave the Bs till you have some slack/delay time whilst/after doing the As (remember, Bs are Not Urgent - right?).

The Cs are just ignored until they become Important, and, if they never become Important, then they never need to be actioned and can safely be deleted after a while.

I have coached others in the use of this ABC scheme, and it has saved my sanity and that of those I have coached. I recall one particular incident where I coached one of the systems engineers who reported to me - a really able and intelligent guy who was in his first job. I noticed that he was having great difficulty doing all his work and was rushing around like a mad thing. After having a chat with him, I saw the problem immediately. After my coaching him on the ABC method (he picked it up in a flash), he went away and started to rigorously apply it. I had asked him to report back to me on progress after 2 days, and he did. He was overjoyed, being now on top of his work and he knew exactly what his priorities were. He thanked me profusely and said that, though he liked his job, he had been on the point of resigning as he felt like he was just being overworked beyond his coping limit. He was amazed how that simple method had changed his whole outlook on work and made his life bearable and more enjoyable.
He was able to gain a sense of achievement from the knowledge that he had the power to control his workflow and focus on doing a good job by addressing the priorities.

I originally had a simple paper-based system for the prioritised tasklists, but I later made it computer-based on a nifty relational database PIM for managing text records (Lotus Agenda). I could look at (say) all the As together, and make progress notes about them and flag them as "Done" when they had been completed (the date of setting the "Done" flag was automatically recorded), and then review the Bs to see if any warranted action or upgrading to As, and make notes about them also. I would ignore the Cs unless some event had raised the priority of one of them.

This system was easily replicated to a greater extent using the PIM InfoSelect v8, but that has become legacy software (does not run perfectly on Win10-64bit PCs) and I have now replicated it to a lesser extent by using @mouser's CHS (ClipboardHelp&Spell), which is quite versatile. I found I could extend its versatility by using the CHS Virtual Folders functionality and making fuller notes (where necessary) in MS Office OneNote - with CHS as a kind of front-end to that. It's a bit kludgy, but it works.
If the NoteFrog beta had not been prematurely pulled, I would probably have migrated from CHS to that by now, because NoteFrog was designed as a PIM, whereas CHS is not (though it originally was).

This does not mean that using CHS for the ABC scheme is not a good, workable idea - as I have proven for myself. It got even better for this purpose when the automatic SQL generator was built-in (and especially when that later had its bugs fixed). That made the CHS Virtual Folders functionality much more effective.    :Thmbsup:

mouser:
This discussion makes me think that a nice clean todo list interface which allowed for flexible fast filtering might be nice.. So you just have a list of todo items which you can tag in various ways and set different priority numbers to etc, and then a very quick easy way to set the filter to show ALL items, or only items with certain tags, or only items above a certain priority, or after a certain date, etc.

The main idea would be to be able to really quickly hide most items so you felt like you were working with a small list, while still preserving the ability to show all the items when you need to.

IainB:
^^ Yes, well, that's kinda what I was suggesting.
The thing is, to all intents and purposes that functionality seems to be already included in CHS, so reinvention of the wheel is probably not required.

The discrete lists of tasks (e.g., As, Bs, Cs) could be displayed as virtual folders using (say) the "Keywords" field, or something with just a single letter - A, B, C. and the same or some other field to flag "Done", etc.
I can't believe I am suggesting anything new to you here.

wraith808:
P.S. Actually I tried to create software versions of OnTask in the past, by combining Samurize and Desktop Coral to create a strip on the top of my screen with the todo tasks, as well as a list that shows up as my wallpaper. But it was too tedious to keep them updated, and they either cut into the screen real estate or got covered up by other windows, so eventually my eyes just glossed over them.
-dr_andus (July 02, 2017, 05:36 AM)
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I think there's a problem intrinsic to trying to make OnTask digital.  Some things need to be touched, and felt, and simple in order to succeed. What I've found using OnTask is that I'm bad at prioritizing large amounts of anything, and estimating how long something does take or should take, and easily distracted.  Backlogs, after working with Agile for 4+ years don't really work, as you're never really trying to clear them, so they become built up with a lot of detritus that distract.  There's a whole lot of that on our backlog at work, and we're never going to prioritize them, even if we have nothing to do.  They just don't matter.  And so the stack rank becomes meaningless. 

Distraction is the human condition now, I think, to our detriment.  And I think the best weapon against distraction is simplification.  I was skeptical about OnTask when I got into the kickstarter.  I'd tried several different ways to keep up with a todo list, and in the end they all fail.  Too much stuff in too many buckets.  Too much information, which instead of informing, lead to distraction.  Now I wish that I'd gotten another so I'd have one for home and one for work, because it works.  I've always thought that people were wrong when they said multitasking didn't work.  But it's true - there's a cost to switching tasks, and it's not always evident.  One task at a time and my full attention to that is my new work philosophy.

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