A fight with todo list

2023-02-15

As a student, I'm always in a sea of tasks, and through out the years i've tried many method of managing them. Unfortunatly, none of them is perfect. Some of them worked for a quater or two, but most failed. I often find myself unmotivated to continue to create, view and check off tasks after a certain "hyped" period.

In my opinion, there are two main reasons why a task managing system will fail:

  • It is too hard to interactive with
  • It has no priority management

Lets talk about each point:

point 1

It it too hard to interactive with

During a previous iteration of my task mangaement system, i used miro, and created something like this:

I attempted to create a todo list like a mindmap, where i link tasks to each other and subtasks. The idea being that task are eaiser to manage when it works more closely to the human mind.

After using this method for half of autumn quater 2022, I concluded the following:

  • The mind map method does help with understanding the nature of my tasks. It helps me to decided if the task i'm looking at is worth my time.
  • The mind map is really hard to maintain. I cannot quickly enter a task when i need to, I have to find "space" and organise the stick notes on the boards.

point 2

It has no priority management

Currently i've been testing out another methods of mine, which involves Obsidian notebook, its tasks and the DayPlanner plugin, and a todo script.

I sepereated my tasks into three different catagories:

  1. Homework
  2. School
  3. Personal and i keep track of them in a Task.md file. In which i have the following query code:
  4. A due to day section:
(happens today) OR (happens tomorrow)
(tag includes #Homework) OR (tag includes #School ) OR (tag includes #Personal )
NOT (done)
sort by due

Explanation of this Tasks code block query:

(happens today) OR (happens tomorrow) => OR (At least one of): due, start or scheduled date is on 2023-02-15 (Wednesday 15th February 2023) due, start or scheduled date is on 2023-02-16 (Thursday 16th February 2023)

(tag includes #Homework) OR (tag includes #School ) OR (tag includes #Personal ) => OR (At least one of): tag includes #Homework tag includes #School tag includes #Personal

NOT (done) => NOT: done

  1. A happend before, happening today and due tomorrow section:
(happens today) OR (due tomorrow) OR (happens before today)
(tag includes #Homework) OR (tag includes #School ) OR (tag includes #Personal)
NOT (done)
group by tags reverse
sort by due

Explanation of this Tasks code block query:

(happens today) OR (due tomorrow) OR (happens before today) => OR (At least one of): due, start or scheduled date is on 2023-02-15 (Wednesday 15th February 2023) due date is on 2023-02-16 (Thursday 16th February 2023) due, start or scheduled date is before 2023-02-15 (Wednesday 15th February 2023)

(tag includes #Homework) OR (tag includes #School ) OR (tag includes #Personal) => OR (At least one of): tag includes #Homework tag includes #School tag includes #Personal

NOT (done) => NOT: done

  1. and a all task section
(tag includes #Homework) OR (tag includes #School ) OR (tag includes #Personal)
sort by due date
group by tags
NOT (done)

Explanation of this Tasks code block query:

(tag includes #Homework) OR (tag includes #School ) OR (tag includes #Personal) => OR (At least one of): tag includes #Homework tag includes #School tag includes #Personal

NOT (done) => NOT: done

However, after 6 weeks of use, i noticed that this method does not handle priority well. Due to the fact that i've made it so easy to create a task, I often put down tasks that are not well thought off.

For example:

As you can see here, I want to do several reading that are related to programming. But as of the time of writing, none of these task have been done, and they are well pass due date.

The first thing that is wrong with these task are their wording. They are uses vague phrase like "skim through", "read". These makes me feel unmotivated as the intructions are unclear.

Another things is that these readings are important to me, so when i created them I specified deadlines. However, because they do not have the immediate urgency similar to a homework, I often have to place them under tasks that have a Homework or School tag, and then subsequently forget about them.

Plan for improvement

So what is my plan for improvements?

  1. section proritize urgency -> sections prioritize importance(following the Eisenhower Matrix)

I will focus on only managing important tasks and avoid unimportant tasks(especially when they are not urgent)

  1. use general action words -> use specific, achivable objective nouns.

Using general action words makes me not wanting to do the task, so I have to tangible descriptions thatt tells me exactly what is it that i need to do.