Universal Binary

One TODO List

I have a single list that tracks everything I needed to do. Be it a reminder to put a garbage bin in the car or work on upgrading a dependency in production, everything goes in the same place.

Sometimes this will not be where all the information is. Many of the things I need to do for work, for example, require a link to our internal issue tracking system. For open source tickets, I have a GitHub link.

But the important thing is that I don't go to GitHub or our internal ticketing system to figure out what I need to do. I have a single TODO list

Since I have one TODO list, it gets a lot of things. If my wife asks me to run an errand, it becomes a task. In my one-on-one meeting with my manager, if I make a commitment, it becomes a task. If a conference e-mails me to suggest I participate in the CFP, it becomes a task. The tasks accumulate fast.

Currently, I feel like I'm on top of things and not behind on anything. In this calm, smooth sailing situation, I have around 200 tasks in my list. If every time I opened my list, I would have to look through 200 items to figure out what I am doing, I would get frustrated.

Instead, I have appropriate filters on it. "Today and not related to work" when I am at home relaxing. "Overdue and related to work" when I get to the office in the morning, to see I dropped anything on the floor. "Things that are either not related to work or need to be done at home and due soon" for when I'm at home catching up in the evening.

As I mentioned, I use TODOist. I think it's perfectly reasonable. However, there are a lot of equally reasonable alternatives. What's not reasonable is anything that does not let you tag and filter.

One Calendar

I have gotten all my calendars feeding into a single pane of glass, which color-codes the source. My calendars include:

• Work calendar (the feeding removes sensitive information)
• A Trello board with the Calendar power-up for co-ordinating events with my family.
• TODOist's due date/time calendar.
• Personal calendar invites.
• My "Daily schedule", which is where I try to document my plans for each hour I am awake, by day of the week.

I have a daily morning task to review the calendar for the day.

One Time Tracker

I use Toggl. The coolest feature in Toggl is that the Firefox button integration integrates with TODOist and GitHub, so I have a button that says "start working on this". Some of the things I do are not tracked at tasks. As a horrible work-around, I have a Microsoft TO-DO pinned tab. This does not violate the "One TODO list" motto, because these are not tasks I ever plan to accomplish. This are simply things I can activate as a "thing I am doing" with one click: for example, "dinner" or "figuring out next task".

Since as long as I am alive I am doing "something", my time tracker is always supposed to be ticking. I also have a daily task to go over the tracked items and fix spelling and add appropriate metadata so that I have less pressure to do so when I start tasks.

Zero Notes

A note is just some information that has no place. Everything should have a proper place. If I want to take down some information and not sure what is its proper place, then it goes in the TODO list. The action item is "figure out where to put this."

I have a links file, where I put links. I have a recipes GitHub repo, where I put recipes. I have a "Notes" folder in Dropbox, but the only notes that go there are things that I need to be able to see immediately on my phone. This means that every note should have an expiry date, and after that they can be archived.

During the beforetimes, I would have flight information for trips there, and the like. In these times, sadly, this folder is mostly empty until the world is right again.

Zero Unpinned Tabs

Firefox has an amazing feature called "pinned tabs". Pinned tabs are always left-most, and only have their icon showing up. My pinned tabs include my E-mail, my Calendar, WhatsApp, TODOist, and the Microsoft To-Do hack.

Other tabs get closed. Since many of my tasks generate a lot of open tabs, when cross-referencing documentation, this is an easy reminder. Whenever I can't see all tab titles, I close everything unpinned. Anything that I hesitate to close gets converted to a task with the TODOist browser extension and then closed.

Zero E-mails

I have daily tasks to empty out my personal and work inbox. Anything that can't be emptied in the time I allocated to doing that gets converted to a task.

Zero Floating Tasks

Tasks get created in "Inbox" with no "due date". There is a daily task have that list have zero items. Items can be non-floating by being assigned to a project and having one of three things be true:

• It's marked @when:time_permitting, which is effectively equivalent to "Archived".
• It's marked @status:subtask, which means it is part of a bigger task where it is managed.
• It's marked with a specific day I plan to do it ("due date", but it does not actually mean "due date").

(Work in Progress) One Report

I am working on having one report that pulls via API integration from Toggl, TODOist, and FastMail Calendar (CalDav) details for the past week and summarizes them. For example, how many things did I do without a task? Did they make sense? What was my calendar saying I did at the time?

I have a rough prototype, so now it is mostly debugging the logic to make sure I am getting everything I expect and cleaning up the Look And Feel so I can see as much as possible on one screen. I am using Jupyter for that.

Summary

For some people, "small amounts of chaos" is a reasonable goal. But for me, it's zero or infinity Funneling everything to one TODO box allows emptying all the others. Funneling everything to one calendar means only checking in one place "what am I supposed to be doing".