@jnjosh’s internet weblog.
It’s been a bit over 10 years since I first became an engineering manager—minus a couple non-manager roles in the startup world as a lead engineer. That realization and my normal end of year productivity reboot has had me thinking a lot about how I operate outside of the core mechanics of how I do things—namely how I have changed and how things operate in my head. The thing is, I’ve always been really good at dropping work out of my head at the end of the day.
I’ve written from time to time about productivity on this blog. I definitely think about todo lists and productivity too much and constantly try different things. Earlier this year I went back to paper even just to keep track of all the things I need to do in a day. Well… starting a new job gave me another opportunity to evaluate how I track todos… and I’m back to using Things 3, but in a new way!
You may have noticed lately that I’ve been blogging a bit more regularly. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do with my site but always found reasons not to do it. A lot of times the reasons were just being busy—which is kind of a fake reason. Other times it was I just didn’t know what I wanted to write about. So I’d like to talk a little about what changed in my blogging mindset, what tools I’ve been using, and how I’ve started building a second brain.
It‘s been at least two years since I last wrote about TODO lists and I‘ve tried several different options from going back to the Bullet Journal, trying OmniFocus again, to using Agenda for notes and todos. Through all this I still wasn’t feeling like I found a great system and easily could convince myself to ignore a todo or have to do weird things like moving tasks when I couldn’t get to them in a day.
I really enjoyed this post about using Things 3. I’ve been using it off and on since last year but this post has already changed how I structure my projects. The funny thing is I now have more areas and projects but I don’t feel as overloaded as when I had a more dense hierarchy. I previously had projects children of companies or bigger contexts. Now projects have their own area.
TODO lists never seem to work for me. I’ve tried most of them from OmniFocus to the Bullet Journal to scheduling every moment of every day on a calendar. Between my work at BA3, side projects, CocoaHeads and CocoaHeads.tv, and just normal home tasks; I struggle with this daily. This afternoon I decided to try another brand of TODO list, Remember the Milk and I think I realized why I don’t stick with it.
I feel like I link to Manton Reece all the time here. His blog is really the reason for why I’ve started blogging again. I often struggle with the dilemma of choice when it comes to things to get done. Work stuff is easier because someone is depending on you. It’s so easy to rationalize away your own goals. This idea of getting one thing done really resonates with me. Using something like Pomodoro or any task system, you can even try to get one thing done in some fixed set of time.