January
2006
MyPDA0
For the last 2 months or so, I’ve been experimenting with my own version of the hipster PDA . Mine is rather flat, that is I keep no separation into projects. There are 2 stacks of cards one for todo lists and one for meeting summaries. The later doesn’t follow any conventions, I just take notes there (and the limited space forces me to be more concise; hurray to that).
With the todo list I did try to come up with some structure. Every line starts with a name of the person in charge1. The line is slightly indented so I can put one of 3 marks next to it:
- ‘v’ when its done
- ‘d’ when it is deferred
- ‘x’ when it is obsolete
Every “closed” line is marked by one of the above marks and is highlighted (I picked it up somewhere from 43folders). This way it is very easy to see what are the opened tasks.
A task becomes obsolete when I realize it was a stupid idea to begin with, and what-the-hell was I thinking when I jotted it in the first place. I love these tasks. A task is deferred when it stays too long as the only open one in its card. Put it differently it is the only non-highlighted one in its card. Since I can not make it obsolete (darn), I move it to the latest card. This sounds a bit tedious but practically it isn’t as your motivation to close those tasks which you keep dragging around increases.
I find my self scanning all the cards a couple of times a day, looking for open tasks and picking up those which seems to be more relevant or more annoying (depending on my productivity meter). Again it sounds tedious but it isn’t. This linear process makes it harder to neglect tasks and thus is pretty helpful. For me this life hack works which is more than I can say of any other trick I’ve tried.
1 Believe it or not they let me supervise programmers ;)