Ask Lemmy

Personal to-do lists, a two-tier todo.txt process.

I have One Big Todo list, into which everything goes, with (at the least) added date and priority. At any job, this list becomes unmanageable and overwhelming within a couple of months, so I use the Executive List process a the second tier. It's the critical part that makes the rest work.

I create a new executive list every morning; it's a list of things from my main list that I think I could accomplish that day. It is always larger than I have time for: the important thing about "could do today" is that it's things that I'm able to complete - I have everything I need to do - not whether I necessarily have time. But the list is reasonable; it's not hugely more stuff than I can accomplish, it's just that I know I won't complete everything. As I check things off, they're also checked off the big list. New things only go in the big list first, although they might also get added to the executive list.

The EL is psychological:

• It's manageable. It's not a overwhelming, like the Big List of Everything I Need to Do is. It's easier to face.
• I know I won't complete everything, because I've intentionally overloaded it so that I can't. This removes the stress to "do everything" on the list.
• It is trashed at the end of the day, and the first thing I do the next day is create a new list from scratch. This further removes stress about the importance of the list.

The big list only ever gets bigger. Once a month, quarter, or year I go through the big list and delete (well, archive) everything that's OBE. But the nature of management is that there's always more than you can do, and much of it isn't really important, but you can't determine this in the moment. This is like going into Jira and deleting tickets over two years old, or whatever similar progress your team uses.

The EL lets you prioritize accomplishable tasks for the day; it's ephemeral, and surmountable. It's also a way to break down bigger tasks from the Big List into bite-size chunks; the BL may have "resolve issue requiring scheduled server reboots", and you might put "talk to OPs about sending nightly logs to dev team" on the EL.

I used to just fill journals with pages and pages of to-do lists. It was worse than useless. Even moving it to todo.txt was a partial solution, because while it was easier to query, the list still became overwhelming. I dreaded looking all that list. The EL changed all that. I start the day looking at the BL, poking at it, pulling some things out into the EL for the day, maybe deleting some OBE items, but it's low key. Once I get a half dozen or dozen things in the EL, I stop, and start working on those items.

Throw it away at the end of the day, though - completed or not. If you're completing everything, add more stuff tomorrow; you should always have something to throw away, to reinforce that you're not trying to do everything. Don't carry the EL forward, or it just becomes another BL.

Some scripts really help, here. Copying things from BL to EL; completing things in the BL that were completed in the EL. It's not necessary, but it makes things easier. This is why I use todo.txt - it's plain text, and easily manipulatable with standard Unix text processing tools, and so easy to script.