Help: Building Awesome Personal Organization Systems
Related to: Rationality Power Tools
I’m looking to use (or make) something that helps me achieve god-like productivity. In particular, I’m interested in any information about systems that are:
Flexible: They can be extended or customized to accommodate new work-flows and a diverse range of information structures (like to-do lists, schedules, etc.), perhaps via easy coding.
Linked: The elements can be connected and categorized using a variety of link types (like is_an_action_for, is_a_subgoal_of, etc.).
I would prefer not to have a bunch of separate systems if possible. From what I’ve seen so far, org-mode seems the most promising.
I’ve been using org-mode since 2008. The most stable usage pattern is clocking the work time under the relevant org section whenever I’m working on a project. This gives a nice progress metric and a rough log of what I did and how long it took. Some kind of cross-referenced reading notes system would also be good, but I haven’t gotten around to properly setting one up yet.
Org-mode really works on the single-system aspect, though nowadays an organization system really should do mobile integration too. Org-mode has some kind of external app for ios/Android, but I don’t know how well it works with the rest of the system.
I’m interested in this as well, and a few of us have been talking about it in IRC on and off. I was using Autofocus for a while, but it doesn’t fit your requirements, and it turned out not to fit mine. I’ve got a system I like a little better now, which I’m trying out on paper. The basic gist is to keep track of two large task pools (short-term and long-term) and pull from them as well as recurring tasks into a short, manageable daily list. Some of the tasks refer to side lists (“read” “call someone”). I’m still working out the kinks, but so far it’s going well. The way I’ve been dealing with tasks chains/subtasks is by just listing the first one, and adding the next after I finish it, but I could also make sublists for those if I needed help remembering what came next.
If we can work together to make something useful to us both, I’d be interested in doing so, but I’m actually inclined away from a system which is sufficiently general to cover two very different work styles (if they turn out to be so). I’d rather have a system which is very good for one thing, and requires very little configuration to do it, than one which is adequate at many things, or requires a lot of configuration to set up the way I want it. (This tends to be the problem with point of sale systems, in my experience.)
I’ve been using something similar to this, I think. I have a whiteboard up on my wall that’s split into ‘long term’ ‘calendar’ ‘every day’ and ‘today’. Long term includes the wishful-thinking type stuff which I move into ‘today’ at some point, ‘calendar’ is stuff that needs to be done at or by a specific time, ‘every day’ is stuff I should be doing all the time like cleaning and mood management. And I tend to re-do the whole board once every couple of weeks or so.
I’m still not sure if I’m using the right categories but this one seems like it has a decent chance of working for me.
I would totally do it on a white board if I had one, but no such luck.
I don’t know how much whiteboards cost around where you are, but buying one is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in terms of self-organisation. I’m actually considering buying a second one at the moment because I have too much stuff I’d like to track.
I dunno either. I have a lot of things stretching my thin funds out right now but I’ll think about whether I can fit that. (Alternatively, I wonder how much white board paint costs. I have a board …)
This sounds a lot like org-mode. “Read” and “call someone” are implemented as tags, which can be added to any item, and there’s a command to extract all items marked as “call someone” so you can do all your calls together.
The separation between short-term and long-term tasks doesn’t (as far as I know) exist in org-mode, but it makes a lot of sense. I have a huge wishlist of things I want to do eventually, some of which are partially done, and they drown out the real TODOs. So I need to figure out a way to hide everything marked “long-term”, or perhaps equivalently, export a list of just the “short-term” items.
Yeah. It looked like it might be similar, but poking around on their site I didn’t notice a really good “summary of what using this is like.” I’m not particularly interested in relearning emacs for an organization tool, anyway, though. My ridiculously overscripted program of choice is irssi. ;)
Workflowy seems to be an awesome alternative to org-mode. Some of it’s strengths:
Online
Very easy to get started
Convenient integrated short list of keyboard shortcuts
I really don’t want to give the sort of stuff I put in org-mode to a random internet startup as anything other than redundant and heavily encrypted opaque blobs of bits. Other than that, org-style stuff probably would work better as a web app these days.
The title is misleading to me—it sounds like something related to group / organizational productivity, while actually the post is about GTD-like personal productivity systems.
Yeah, it was meant to be about personal productivity systems. I changed the title to reflect that.
Upvoted org-mode; it’s universality, simplicity and portability will be hard to impossible to beat. I’ve been using it for 4 month, it was useful from the start but is twice as useful now, learning some tricks and usage patterns.
Another random little thing I find handy for keeping my tasks organized (correct me if such things aren’t of general interest to people reading this thread): I have a walking-around notebook that I use to jot down ideas, compose things, study, etc. (it’s the “everything else” notebook to my organization notebook and my school binder). Whenever I make a note in there of something which requires action—”buy eggs,” “look up the etymology of x,” “call y about z”—I’ll draw a little square next to it. This gives me an ad-hoc checklist which it’s easy to skim for, so when I get home I can move stuff to my task list and check them off. This way I a) don’t lose anything important in the jungle of miscellany, and b) can see at a glance whether I’ve gotten around to something yet or not.
ETA: To clarify, the part I’m recommending/pointing out is the ad-hoc checklist. One could fold that into any setup where one usually has paper around and can remember to look at the paper later.
I read a few tutorials on org-mode here and have been playing with it for the last two days. For those who don’t know, it basically gives you a nice way to organize text hierarchically into levels. Each of the levels have headlines, which can have tags (like :WORK: or :PLAY:).
I’ve been enjoying it so far. In my file I have Fun (:VALUE:) at the top, and projects that aim to increase Fun on the second level. Then sub-projects inherit from projects, and so on until I’ve reached physical next actions (which form TODO lists). I like being able to keep track of why I’m doing things because it helps keep me motivated, and facilitates re-evaluation and optimization. So far org-mode seems to give me a good way to do this.
I had an idea while commenting elsewhere. We—or at least I—keep looking for an organization system which suits us so well that we can keep using it and stop looking. But if the systems itself are interesting enough to explore, that might be the wrong goal. When you’re trying a new method of keeping your tasks arranged, do you find yourself more productive and interested in the work you have to do? If so, why not exploit the novelty, and deliberately change up the format/interface of your system every once in a while, so as to stay excited about it?