Wiegley's "Today's agenda has 133 items on it," now joins David Foster Wallace's "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today," in quotes I wish I could recite to others to express how I think and feel.
Tangentially,
> I have over 30,000 tasks in my Org Mode overall. 23,000 of them are TODOs. Several thousand of them are still currently open. I'm never gonna see them all. Even if I wanted to, I'm never gonna see them all.
Plain text files are cheap and occupy basically 0 space. Whenever I have an overfull todo list - let's call it todo.txt - I copy it to a file named x.txt, and trim it down. Then when I finish that, I go back to whatever is left in todo.txt.
Now pretend that I cut and cut but can't bring myself to reduce x.txt to less than, say, 50 items, every one essential to complete by today. What do I do then? I copy x.txt to y.txt, and reduce x.txt to just what I plan to do for the next 4 hours. If that's still too long, I copy y.txt to z.txt, x.txt to y.txt, and reduce x.txt again. You could always start lower in the alphabet (a.txt) if you want more "space".
You get the idea. The point is, with text files, if it's got too much in it, create a backup version of that file and cut it down to size. Repeat as necessary until your todo list is manageably long.
Anecdotally, managing todos usually takes a few minutes, as I’m tracking them already. After that I have the whole day mapped out so I can work without being distracted by worrying about priorities. And having actual breaks everything is noted down, not shuffling around in your brain.
As a systemiser using GTD I have an ever growing list of items to get to should I complete items for the day, but I don't understand how you could expect to address 133 items in a day.
If the approach is to let low priority items roll over, that just seems like a recipe for dropping the ball.
Are people getting through 133 items in a day? That's 216 seconds per item.
I haven't given the article the dedicated read that I intend to yet but my impression is that he does not expect to address all 133 items and it does not matter.
As someone who has compulsively accumulated lengthy to-do lists and buckled beneath the phantom of hopes and intentions of varying importance and ambition I find it enlightening that the possibility of completing a task other than those that are important enough to not have to write down to begin with can be measured by their meaningfulness and address according to this measure.
I gather that the .0050% of information that I consume daily is what is of the greatest priority and the remaining 99.995% is synthesized and iterated over the next day until it reemerges as something important. I suspect that Wiegley completes on average about 5 important things each day. This sounds like a solid baseline.
If it's the Org Mode agenda view in anything close to its default configuration, those 133 items will contain not just tasks scheduled for today, but also any incomplete tasks that were either scheduled for time before today, are past deadline, or have a deadline coming in the next 7 days (IIRC, maybe it's 14).
This is to say, if you don't keep on top of current work, the agenda view quickly turns into an ever growing wall of shame.
I have a pretty weird love-hate relationship with it because of that.
It entirely depends on which tasks you have and where they are coming from. Not every task has to some unique hour-long work. People who are using routines, pre-defined lists or elaborated project-planning, usually have very detailed and long daily lists full of small tasks, each in the range of some second to minutes of work.
Maybe the 133 items are 120 items of one minute work each, and the rest are conditional or optional task you will not do that day.
It may be helpful to have future tasks written down even if will only take a few minutes, something like “remind someone about something” and recurrent stuff. Then there are checklists.
Indeed. But the action of creating is a list is separate and indeed different from actionioning said list. Creating lists reduces my anxiety significantly...
It used to reduce anxiety for me too, until my brain learned that, unless acted upon immediately, those lists get out of date within couple days, at which point they never shrink. More than once I ended up with lists that rot faster than I'm able to fix them, so I eventually stopped planning too much in advance.
I dont think it's as simple as that, after all there are book written about task management.
When "something" comes up, it's not always clear to me whether it's urgent or not, important or not. Getting it out into a list frees my mental capacity.
For example, I got a reminder to renew my passport yesterday. Not urgent, but important. Goes onto a list. I'll eventually prioritize and schedule it in my weekly review.
The key (for me) it aggressively devote attention to pruning these lists.
Breadth is not the issue, depth is. Nor there is much that I can reduce horizontally. At work, two or three open tickets + some blocked work in the "back burner" can already trigger the problem; on personal side, there's even more stuff that I need to keep track of, and take care of in parallel.
Those few "active" items and some more "standby" items are easy to list and read by themselves, but unexpanded, they're also non-actionable. And what I learned is, trying to expand even a few of them more than one level down quickly becomes overwhelming, and creates big overhead - as I work on one thing, the task breakdowns for the rest go stale, requiring additional effort to fix them. It surprised me just how fast this happens (and how quickly it leads me to stop looking at my own plans).
Related and perhaps extreme example that taught me much is when I took a medium-sized ticket that seemed perfectly doable in two to three work-weeks, and attempted to break it down all the way to actionable TODOs no larger than 2 to 4 hours worth of work. I wanted to see if this would streamline my work and allow me to make a more precise time estimate for the whole ticket.
I probably spent a day or two on the breakdown itself, complete with estimates and dependency links for every item - starting Z requires X and Y to be done, Y is done when A and B are done, etc. Standard project management stuff - lets you compute critical path and prioritize accordingly, and even draw a Gantt chart. My 3-week project ended up having some 150 tasks in it. Initially it looked great, but just a day or two into actual work, I found myself redoing large parts of the breakdown. Every two or three ticked-off tasks, the newly-gained knowledge made it apparent some task dependencies were to too strict, or entirely unnecessary. Large subtrees had to be split, shifted around or deleted, or had to have their estimates adjusted, all while new actionable tasks had to be added (and broken down). And that doesn't even includes the time spent readjusting the list after being pre-empted by some unrelated, critical-priority tasks.
All that planning quickly became a huge maintenance overhead. I only ever started making progress on the project itself when I stopped paying attention to my lists. That experience has taught me to stop breakdowns much earlier, and to stop eagerly breaking everything down to the same level - however good estimates I got this way, they weren't even needed for anything, and at the same time, they were constantly invalidated by added re-planning overhead.
These days, I don't break down work ahead of time beyond what's apparent and useful at the moment. I went from ahead-of-time to just-in-time.
Another factor is, it seems I'm really bad at the whole separation of planning and execution stages. My mind doesn't work that way, and can't stay in "execute this list one item at a time" mode for very long.
What an incredibly on-the-nose anecdote, I love it!
The term of art for this strategy is "size to the horizon". Imagine you're looking across an open plain. The trees and rocks closer to you are bigger and you can make out more detail. The ones further away are still abstract.
You have to know exactly what to do with the things right in front of you, but you have to keep only a general awareness of that which is distant.
Well, I did figure out the solution to my own problem. Also, I mostly like my line of work.
Also, "something you can literally change tomorrow" is very much wrong, for the usual obvious reasons: I couldn't possibly afford a 90% salary cut, and neither could my family. Given standard life choices, past a certain age your career becomes a shackle.
‘can’ doesn’t equal you likely would want to endure the pain of doing so, or that it would provide an overall net benefit… I chose that specific word for a reason.
Of course there are significant tradeoffs to be made, since there are infinitely many potential tradeoffs in life.
I don't understand that, at some point don't you just forfeit what you haven't done in a month or two and get back onto a manageable list? I mean keeping track of everything is a philosophy, but to the point where the vast majority of your system is just noise, what's the point?
This is why I don't let my to-do lists automatically roll over. If it wasn't important enough to copy to today's to-do list, then maybe it's okay if it's never done. But I do keep them around in some form, because maybe the old to-do items had some interesting ideas associated with them that I might want to re-visit later. Or keep the 'cool ideas' and 'tasks to take action on said cool ideas' separate.
> Noise is either a sound of too short a duration to be determined, like the report of a cannon; or else it is a confused mixture of many discordant sounds, like the rolling of thunder or the noise of the waves. Nevertheless, the difference between sound and noise is by no means precise. — Ganot
At record time, don't know what is signal and what is noise. Separation of signal from noise is not persistence problem, it is presentation problem. Model is sophisticated: number of delays against action intended time, etc. flow into whether task is noise. Being in list is protection against amnesia but not protection against prioritization.
Noise is good. There's nothing wrong with noise. Internet is noise. You only need a good search engine or discovering technique. For Org users there are plenty of different choices - Org-Roam and org-roam-ui; built-in org-agenda, tags and todo stickers; Denote; Khoj, plain grepping, etc.
Noise is bad. Horrifyingly and anxiety inducing. The Internet may be noise, but you never actually see it directly. If one could, it would likely drive them insane. Search engines and other discovery methods is how we view it, and why it works at all.
That's what I'm saying. I don't see all my notes at the same time; I never try to see the entire picture nor do I ever worry about composing a new note, thinking it would just get lost in my mess. My knowledge graph looks like a complex web of interconnected nodes. I have over two thousand indexed notes and a few thousand plain-text, unindexed ones. The tools I've listed above do help you to find what you need easily. I treat my notes as my "personalized Wikipedia" - I don't need to know how it is organized or structured, where specific things physically exist, or in which file a specific text of a note sits. It is noise, but it is useful noise, because I have instruments to "extract music" out of it.
Tangentially,
> I have over 30,000 tasks in my Org Mode overall. 23,000 of them are TODOs. Several thousand of them are still currently open. I'm never gonna see them all. Even if I wanted to, I'm never gonna see them all.