When I was younger and all the things I needed to complete were able to fit in my head, I was always confused by people who wrote things down, made lists and crossed them off methodically. I kept hearing about how writing things down with systems like the bullet journal or obsidian helped people clear their minds. Things didn't seem that complicated to me. Everything could fit in my head and the few things that had hard due dates went into my calender. All these systems I heard of just had too much going on. I had to memorize the system on top of what I already had going on in my head.

What I didn't realize at the time was that whatever system you use has to be personal to you. The system you use needs to fill in you're personal week spots. It needs to be a foundation that you can lean on when your floor starts to shift. What I was hearing when learning about all of these systems was "what people are doing" and "how it helped." The important part of learning a new system is the "why am I doing this." The why is the key piece that informs how useful it can be for you. As I gain more experience, I learn to focus less on "whats" and "hows" and more on "whys."

The most important part of personal task management is only the personal part. Some of you might always want a pen and a list folded in your pocket. Some might want a fancy to-do app with notifications and reminders. Other's might just use the notes app that came with your phone. The important part is that you use it when you need it. No need to have it written down if you just forget the thing at home or worse you remember the paper but forget the damn pen. Or the other way around, either way, it somehow feels worse than forgetting both.

For me, most of the things I need to get done happen on the computer. So that's where I like to keep my list. This has the bonus that when I get up from my computer I stop thinking about my list of tasks. However, when I am seated at my desk access I can access them in a few seconds no matter what I am doing.

The system itself is heavily inspired by the bullet journal, which I tried to do with a physical journal but I found it just sat in my bag untouched after a while. But, I did start categorizing tasks after that experience. My 3 categories for tasks are daily, weekly and monthly. These aren't hard deadlines. They roughly equate to things that need to be done now, things that are waiting on something else to finish first or are scheduled and things that I need to start contemplating but not doing. I find that if I don't put any deadlines on tasks, they don't get done. If everything has a due date they can overwhelm me. With the combination of these 3 groups, I can focus on the imminent task, forget about the ones that are blocked and free up time for those that are around the corner.

Combined with the fact that I can open it without taking my hands off of the keyboard while working means I am more likely to use the system. Therefore, the system is more likely to be effective.

I prefer to work in the terminal so I made a system that fits into that workflow. If I type todo in any terminal on my systems, it will open todays file. If that file doesn't exist, it will take the last file I created, strip any done tasks and create this new file. The files themselves are markdown. The editor I configurable, I was using VSCode for a while but I'm currently using neovim. The tools I use change a lot depending on my day-to-day tasks so I wanted this to work with whatever editor I choose to use in the future. For now, I like the speed of neovim.

The last key to my puzzle is making it available when I am not in a terminal. That's where a dropdown terminal steps in. Currently, I use Guake and can open it with <F12>. If I don't already have it open I can type todo to open today's tasks. Usually, I already have it open as I'm working through tasks on the list and it's only a matter of opening the dropdown terminal to cross things off and pick the next thing to do. If I ever start using graphical editors that day-to-day, this could also work with a key bind that runs todo and configuring the utility to open VSCode.

I've written this utility to handle the files and open whatever editor I'm currently. First in Python then I rewrote it when I started to learn Rust. The rust version can be found here

Hopefully, there is something you can use here to improve your own system. Mine is constently evolving. I am currently thinking about adding a new section to my todo file for notes, and an option in the utility to open the previous day's files via a flag. That way I can write notes and reference them later. I'm also trying out Obsidian for something like however I don't think it would be beneficial to have this split among 2 apps. Another feature I thought could be useful was to calculate what percentage of tasks get carried over from day to day. Mapping out my productivity like this could be insightful but I don't think I doubt it would have the intended effect on me.

The only way I will know how useful any of this can be is to implement it. Then check back in a month or 2 and the properly useful tools will stay in my workflow while the rest will be uninstalled from my machine. I look forward to trying another system in the future and improving my workflow even further.