How do you keep your life organized? What tools & systems do you use?
Hi, Tilderites! I'm looking for a system and/or tool to better manage my tasks and to-do's. I'd like to become more productive & responsive.
My current system is a mix of "mark as unread" for emails, physical "to-do" scribbles on post-it notes, reminders in my phone, and other digital notes. My problem is that once I add something to a task list, I inconsistently follow up on it. My other problem is that most of these tasks are unrelated, so mixing them together is confusing. My ultimate goal is to lighten my mental overhead without reducing productivity.
I need a clear, centralized place to commit to keeping all my atomic tasks outside my 9–5: my social life, family, volunteering, any freelance work, housekeeping, personal projects, and so on.
What tools do you use to stay organized? Do you have any advice for time management?
Extra preferences:
- I'd like to try tools designed for mobile and desktop.
- I love visual tools and benefit from something visually intuitive (but customizable). I love colors.
- Happy to pay for a productivity tool if it's effective.
- I'd like a "one-stop shop" because maintaining different task lists in different tools seems messy. I encapsulate all 9–5 work tasks in a ticket tracking system. That's fine for work, but I only want 2 task apps, not 5. And I'm not sure if an Agile-like system works so well for me in real life.
- I'm looking for something that can capture all my different categories or "tracks" of tasks without burying anything. I prefer to minimize context-switching, so I don't want everything to be visually mixed together; it'll distract me. But I want to make sure I don't forget a whole area of tasks. So this is partially a UI/UX question: what tools have the depth to do this?
- My calendar is neatly organized and color-coded. I rely on it to remember daily obligations. Perhaps I could tie a task management tool into my calendar better.
Maybe you can also offer advice on systems to maintain discipline and follow-up. My highly structured calendar is great and I mostly adhere to it. However, I haven't figured out how to utilize the calendar for oceans of teeny-tiny tasks, so I need something to complement it. In addition to a tool, I'm sure I could benefit from a new philosophical perspective or mental approach to staying tidy.
Thanks in advance! :)
I have had a lot of mileage out of TickTick for my to-do list needs. I dump just about any kind of to-do into it, and have some filters to pull out things that I need to do based on date, location, and context. Some of that is quite manual, and some is more automated.
I like the Folder > List > Task hierarchy which TickTick encourages, and I try to make sure every item in my list has a specific list that it lives in. It also comes with an Inbox, which I treat as a dumping ground for thoughts to come back to every week or so.
I have recently started trying to categorise things in TickTick more, alongside a greater focus on keeping my digital files organised along a similar structure. As have a metric ton of Lists in TickTick (I pay for premium so I can blow past the free-tier limit of 20), and I sort them into Folders such as Life Admin, DM'ing, and Homelabbing. There are few Folders, and massively more Lists beneath them, which each contain an arbitrary number of Tasks (with optional sub-tasks). For example, Life Admin has a List called "Cleaning and Tidying" which contains all of my recurring reminders to do things like deep clean the kitchen, change bedsheets, etc.
I like it a lot, and there's a fair amount of flex within the app. Depending on how unopinionated you like your digital services, you may like that. I tried a different app for a year or so after TickTick started getting unwieldy, and eventually found my way back. The first time I tried, I barely bothered with folders or tags, or priorities. Now I have a fair whack more structure to the way I use it, although each time I open it up I do consider if I'm doing the best thing for me.
In terms of discipline and follow-through... Let me know when you figure something out! I feel increasingly unable to check things off my to-do lists, from a combination of exhaustion and of lack of time. I am debating whether or not a digital system is for me at all, and wondering whether or not to return to something pen & paper based like Bullet Journal. For example, I like the simplicity of not having to always recreate recurring to-do items in a digital system, but dislike the ease with which they can be ignored and left for the next recurrence. When I used to Bullet Journal, I was a lot more brutal about ejecting things that I wouldn't have time for, and I think that lent a certain clarity of focus. Having to manually write it out forces you to think about it. This isn't to say you should ditch the idea of a digital system! More of a personal musing as to their efficacy for me, and whether or not I should try something different next year... Or let go of the idea of "Getting Things Done®" altogether.
Edit because I just remembered: Have a look into Johnny Decimal if you fancy really going absolutely ham on categorising your entire life and having ID'd, unique locations for all things.
I am a highly disorganized person, started using Ticktick (paid version) after seeing it recommended here. I tag everything because that's they only way they're going to be found again.
Another thing I use is the Outlook add-in that lets me add a task from email text. I find it useful for work.
I do wish they let me add timestamp to items with a keyboard shortcut though
Edit: I also like their sort by date across categories option, and their Eisenhower matrix feature too
I'll add that I have used the free version of TickTick for years, so you might find success there too. While I have tried many other options I always end up back at TickTick.
I do suffer from ignoring tasks, but that's more a separate issue. Personally, if I reschedule a task enough times that's usually a good sign it's not that important and allows me to skip the task.
ADHD has made zero systems work at full efficiency for more than a month, so I've gone through a lot of systems. Most of them have vanished without a trace in my mind.
My biggest recent breakthrough was finally correctly implementing something I've known for decades: the only systems I'll pay attention to are the ones that are naturally in my routine. For a digital life, this means browser homepage + new tab page. I add everything I want to implement in my life to my self-hosted homepage:
I do my best to take the motto of "if I didn't curate it, its not on my homepage, and thus its not important". It's about 40% effective.
There have been some other systems I've tried in the style of naturally integrating systems in my routine, but none have worked out. Some of the failures:
Currently I'm hoping for and thinking of making a Google Calendar -> Android alarm integration (as in the loud noisy kind of alarm), since I constantly miss notifications for upcoming events. I may end up biting the bullet and getting a smartwatch (Pebble?) purely for calendar vibration notifications.
My set up is much simpler than this but I wanted to also mention Vikunja. Many months ago I looked into to do trackers and this one was my favourite. It's simple and effective.
My husband and I use Linear, a task manager purpose built for IT teams trying to fix bugs and implement new features. That means that we have to kind of wrangle it, and ignore some of the buttons (like
Copy Issue Name as Git Branch), but it's genuinely the fastest and nicest app we've both found to handle all the backlog in the house and the things we need to do.We use five issue states on the kanban board: Icebox, Backlog, Todo, Progress and Done. That, and there's also some housekeeping states like Cancelled, Duplicate and Won't Fix. Everything goes into Backlog by default. An issue isn't meant to stay there for long, and either gets moved into Todo or Icebox if it's not as important. We use the labels feature to assign topics (like home improvement, household repairs, new acquisitions) and assign the issues to either of us. That way we don't get in each other's way.
We also use the comments on the issues to track state without it being ephemeral. Yeah, we could text each other about... I dunno, the state of finally replacing the door handles, but then you'd have to find it in that chat, so we just add "looked at samples" or "ordered parts" into the comments for the relevant issue.
The only thing Linear doesn't really do is documentation, which would be useful for things like "list of cat food our cat likes", but that's just not what Linear is for and I respect that. Other than that, it's an incredibly robust to do list. It can send notifications, supports blocking/blocked by, priority, even a very cool cycles feature that lets you assign issues to be done within repeating blocks of time (like five week units).
I'm aware that's not what it's for and it's overkill, but we're both autistic SOBs, and it works great for us.
I currently mostly rely on similar tools to what you describe: a mixture of unread emails, my calendar, post-it's, a notes app, tabs, and google docs that I date with my thoughts every work day.
That said, given that you mentioned colour and openness to try other tools, here are two my teams use that work fairly well:
Wait, doesn't Notion have a free tier? I use it from time to time for personal notes and I've never paid a single cent, just paid for it using the data they harvest from me.
Oh, maybe you're right! I've always had to share with at least one person and they hooked us with a free trial so I haven't looked into downgrading.
Ah gotcha, fair enough! Quickly searched their plans and they do a free tier but it doesn't connect to any third-party tools so I'm not sure how easily OP would be able to connect Notion to Google Calendar.
I also struggle to keep my to-dos organized but I've had decent luck and experiences with Google Tasks + Calendar. They integrate fairly well with each other and I can see my tasks in my Google Calendar view which I find useful. You can organize your tasks into lists so you can have different lists for different categories of tasks.
I think you might have some luck with Trello. You can organize your tasks (cards/sticky notes) into lists, collect those lists into boards, and then have multiple boards in your account. Like other Atlassian tools, there's a million ways to structure things in order to get shit done. I used Trello for a short while and I organized it basically like Jira. I had lists for "To-do", "Doing", "Finished" and within each list, I had cards with my tasks. In each card, you can add labels, dates, checklists and more. Trello surfaces a lot of this info to your board's overall view like label of each task, due date, # of subtasks completed, etc. so it's very easy to glance at your board and gauge your progress. You can probably try to match the color of things on your calendar to your Trello board for some continuity. A newer feature with Trello (that I never got to try) is something called Inbox. It's essentially an area for you to dump things so that you can then come back and organize them later. If I recall, you email things to an address and Trello will then surface them to you when you next open the app. It lets you forward emails, capture new tasks, and more.
Trello's free tier is decent, and I believe all the things I listed above is available in the fre version. The paid tiers give you access to more third party extensions, new views for your board, AI features, and more.
I’ve simplified and burned my life down to the ground such that my organizational requirements can be met with a checklist on the back of a grocery store receipt.
Intense
Where do you store the older receipts?
I've tried dozens of organizers. I've used org-mode for several months, tried task warrior, the Things 4 suite for Apple hardware, Obsidian, Joplin, Logseq.
Somehow, none of them work for me.
So this fall, I started vibecoding my own thing. It's called "ayatus" (from the Finnish word "ajatus" meaning "thought"). It's written in 100% Rust and I also used an Arch Linux derivative while making it (btw). It consists of a core library, a CLI (that is fully working right now), a server component to be used as synchronization and a web component for mobile use. The server and web ui exist in code, but are more like theoretical at this point. I'm not using them myself for anything yet.
It stores its data in SQLite locally, and supports also WASM with IndexedDB.
It handles TODOs (with datestamps and org-mode -style standard repeater and from-completion repeater) and generic notes.
It looks like this on the terminal right now.
https://imgur.com/jhlrwsM
https://imgur.com/spuqOSn
I'm fantasizing that it would look the same in the web ui too, but we'll see how viable that idea is.
I selected "/" to mark a context because I kinda enjoyed how it looks like a directory. ":" marks a tag (which I selected because that works much better than "#" for shell completions), "@" is a prefix for datestamp and "+"/"." are for recurrences.
The basic features work well enough that I'm able to use it myself, but I'll want to work on it a bit more (including reading every line of code with my own eyes) before I potentially release it. At least the fundamental features (core lib, CLI and web) should be AGPL. If I get greedy, perhaps I'll make the server be proprietary and with a price tag. But probably I won't, the hassle of taking payments might not be something I want right now.
It's not going to be better than org-mode or taskwarrior for most people, obviously, but it's already better than either of them for me.
Hi @Atvelonis i think the suggestion from @artvandelay to give Trello a try might be a good idea for you. I used to use Trello for a few years, and liked it alot. (I recently moved away from Trello, but not due to lack of features, nor anything bad or nefarious that Trello did...Moved more for my differing work flow, plus my desire to use more open source stuff or self-host my own things, etc.) Trello seems to check some of the features you seek.
Managing data and files: Tiago Forte’s PARA method; often how I structure folders.
Tasks: David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) method. I use Things 3 app, inbox ideas using Apple Reminders (it exports to Things 3)
Ideas and notes: Obsidian. I like to be able to connect ideas through linked thinking, linked notes. Nick Milo’s concept of ACE folder structure (Atlas, Calendar, Efforts) works best for me. Kepano, the username of me of the CEOs of Obsidian, has a great example of how they setup a simple and easy to use Obsidian “vault.”
Finances: I use a spreadsheet to keep my budget and financials organized.
I vibe out the rest.
I use Google Agenda for most things. I should probably be using Todoist more; I just didn't have the need for a while. My wife has a good memory, so I ask her a lot of the things that are not on Google Agenda for some reason. Sometimes twice. Sometimes more. I have ADHD. Anything complicated or clever is likely to fail. The best for me is having the most predictable routine possible. That is not always possible, but it is the ideal.
Mine is a fairly simple option.
I have an app that allows me to place a widget to do list that I view it as soon as I unlock my screen.
I keep it next to my google calendar widget that shows me the date and my appointments for current and next day.
This way I don’t have to rely on opening apps to keep track of things. I can only see 5 tasks so I try to keep my list short at all times. This keeps me from stacking up a bunch of items, if I want to add a new one and I’m at 5 I have to finish one of the other things. You can add more things if you choose to, this is just my personal system.
The app is called structured. I did pay a one time fee to use the todo list feature. It has other tools like time slotting, notifications, etc but I don’t use them so I can’t speak on the effectiveness. I only wanted the widget.
This is the only way that I have found to be compatible with my ADHD. It’s not overwhelming, I can’t forget to look at it, and it’s easy to set up.