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I had the same problem as you, but my solution was separating "notes" from future actions. My notes track knowledge, they are referenced as-needed so I store e

I had the same problem as you, but my solution was separating "notes" from future actions. My notes track knowledge, they are referenced as-needed so I store everything because there's low/no cost. I've also found that writing things down improves my recollection, so there's value even if I never reference the note again. My calendar / omnifocus track future actions, I minimize these and keep them very well curated - no "todo", only "do". Externalizing some cognition takes time in exchange for efficiency... less overhead from context switching or remembering unrelated items. The tradeoff is loosely analogous to scheduling in computing - inefficient for an isolated single thread of work, but beneficial when coordinating lots of concurrent work.

lucideer 9y ago
> no "todo", only "do" I'm curious about what this means. What are "do" notes (as distinct from "todo" ones). If it means that don't calendar, and you just do that task immediately, how you plan and (more importantly) remember future tasks?
- MichaelBurge 9y ago
  In practice, most people's "todo" list ends up being the garbage bin for low-priority items that they'll never actually do. It's worth separating the things you actually plan to do next week/month, from the ones in a "backlog". Grep any large code repository for "TODO" comments.
  - lucideer 9y ago
    As someone who's worked on multiple teams that used TODO comments and then had a regular type of sprint in which they were grepped and cleared (these weren't perfect projects, there were other organisational problems, but this particular thing was handled well), I was actually quite surprised to get into a discussion recently here on HN about projects where this doesn't happen and TODO comments end up being largely aspirational. However, I think code and life are slightly different contexts here. I get what you mean about separating aspirations from near-term actual intents but I generally use the word "todo" to refer exclusively to the latter (which still doesn't help a whole lot with ensuring execution as the list still grows quite large).
- losteric 9y ago
  TODOs are crufty ambiguous notes that often poorly describe the current system and potential future work... and they're so easy to add that the average "todo" is very low-value, dragging down the perceived ROI of fixing any tech debt. I keep the two separate: good notes describing the state of the world, and a calendar to schedule future actions. When it comes to software, that means all code must have good documentation and known flaws are scheduled to be fixed. If it's not worth scheduling, it's not worth changing. My personal life follows the same pattern, although much less formal... there just isn't enough time for every possibility, so I always work backwards from my calendar.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
I think it helps to do only enough to be useful and not enough to be a productivity sink. I keep a general purpose plaintext file called notes and a handful of plaintext files specific to certain topics in ~/documents and that's it.

lucideer 9y ago

> no "todo", only "do" I'm curious about what this means. What are "do" notes (as distinct from "todo" ones). If it means that don't calendar, and you just do that task immediately, how you plan and (more importantly) remember future tasks?

MichaelBurge 9y ago
In practice, most people's "todo" list ends up being the garbage bin for low-priority items that they'll never actually do. It's worth separating the things you actually plan to do next week/month, from the ones in a "backlog". Grep any large code repository for "TODO" comments.
- lucideer 9y ago
  As someone who's worked on multiple teams that used TODO comments and then had a regular type of sprint in which they were grepped and cleared (these weren't perfect projects, there were other organisational problems, but this particular thing was handled well), I was actually quite surprised to get into a discussion recently here on HN about projects where this doesn't happen and TODO comments end up being largely aspirational. However, I think code and life are slightly different contexts here. I get what you mean about separating aspirations from near-term actual intents but I generally use the word "todo" to refer exclusively to the latter (which still doesn't help a whole lot with ensuring execution as the list still grows quite large).
losteric 9y ago
TODOs are crufty ambiguous notes that often poorly describe the current system and potential future work... and they're so easy to add that the average "todo" is very low-value, dragging down the perceived ROI of fixing any tech debt. I keep the two separate: good notes describing the state of the world, and a calendar to schedule future actions. When it comes to software, that means all code must have good documentation and known flaws are scheduled to be fixed. If it's not worth scheduling, it's not worth changing. My personal life follows the same pattern, although much less formal... there just isn't enough time for every possibility, so I always work backwards from my calendar.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

I think it helps to do only enough to be useful and not enough to be a productivity sink. I keep a general purpose plaintext file called notes and a handful of plaintext files specific to certain topics in ~/documents and that's it.