• 🏖️ We went on a day-road-trip this weekend to Kingston. We walked around the waterfront, which is lovely in the summer! It was a sunny, gorgeous day. We packed some waffle sandwiches and had lunch by the waterfront in Kingston. It was breezy and nice by the lake. We also visited the Pump House Museum and saw some real-life steampunk water pumps from 1851. Cool! Later in the day I got into a small rabbit hole to know more about steam engines and how a centrifugal governor works:
  • Steam Engine – How Does It Work (youtube.com) – Real Engineering
  • How Centrifugal Governors Work (youtube.com)

Steampunk images from the Pump House Museum – Kingston

Kingston waterfront

• 🚗 And on the way back from Kingston we drove through the 1000 Islands Parkway and then the Long Sault Parkway Scenic Routes. It was more than 400km total. Perfect day for a road trip.
• 👟 We went for a 7Km scenic run around Dow’s Lake on Sunday. Again, such nice weather and beautiful scenery. We didn’t run the whole perimeter because we weren’t sure about the distance, so we walked a bit. But we could have run all around, I think it’s less than 10Km so it’s doable! We will come back another day.
• 📚 I’m glad to be back reading The Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher. I read the first book in 2019, and now I’m reading book #11. The writing just gets better with each book. But it is urban fantasy and some of the books were quite formulaic and sometimes it felt repetitive to read them one after the other. I usually take a breather and then come back to the series. And I come back because of the characters, they are great!
• ✅ I’ve been experimenting a GTD setup, just out of curiosity. I thought it would be more impactful, but I think I still prefer my old setup with Nirvana.

—-

Post 25/100 of 100DaysToOffload challenge (Round 2)!

#100DaysToOffload #100Days #weeknotes

Thoughts? Discuss... if you have a Write.as account or Reply by email

---

By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

Inspired by these thoughts, I’ve been testing a Todoist setup in which the main principle is not linking next actions to projects. I’ve used Todoist before using a lot of filters, having lots of projects, priority flags, etc. It became too complicated to manage for me.

You see, linking next actions to projects is not required to have a good system. The basic components of the GTD list organization are:

• Inbox
• Next Action List
• Projects List
• Waiting-for List
• Someday Maybe List
• Calendar

They can be simple lists which makes the system easy enough to implement on paper. Thinking about these building blocks, I wanted to try a simpler setup in Todoist. At least, simpler than what I have tried before. I’m an accomplished overcomplicator 😎.

This is what I came up with.

Lists

I have my typical GTD Dashboard list with links to other parts of my system, like Areas of Focus, Goals and Objectives, Dashboard, Purpose and Principles, etc.

I left a Read/Review list mostly for articles I want to read online. It could be a context (using a label) but I just wanted to test it out as separate list.

I have 2 major action-oriented lists: WORK and PERSONAL. I like to have these two major areas separate, as always. And inside each of these areas I have the same set of folders:

• Agendas: this one could be a context, but I put it as a separate list to be more visible and easily accessible.
• Recurring: for all routines, repeating actions.
• Projects List: using one task per project, separated in a Kanban board style for status.
• Next Actions: all actions go here, labeled with a context.
• On Hold: actions that are blocked for the moment.
• Waiting/Follow-Up: delegated actions, things I’m waiting on.
• Someday: all someday/maybe items.

Contexts

I’m using labels to indicate contexts.

Filters

I’m trying to use the minimal number of filters, so I have filters for Work and Personal Next Actions and some Focus this Week filters.

The “Focus – This Week” filters only show actions that are overdue, due today and with priority flag P1.

The “All Next Actions” filters show all next actions, grouped by label using the “View/Sort By” option in Todoist :

My Thoughts

I’ve been using this setup for about a week now. I’m taking full advantage of Todoist’s quick add keyboard shortcut. It’s very pleasant to use and easy to capture and process things. The inbox is great!

Some of the features I thought I was needing the most like file attachments and reminders don’t seem that important now, I don’t think I’ve used them that much.

I love the option to have a Kanban style view for the projects list:

There are a few things that still bothers me:

• I can’t manually rearrange the order in which the tasks show in the next actions list. The only way is to use priority flags and set it to sort by priority. It’s just because in Nirvana I was used to manually reordering my actions, especially in the Focus lists.
• Not linking next actions to projects: It gives a degree of freedom and simplicity, I understand that. Right now, I don’t have too many projects going on at once. But I envision that particularly at work, when things pick up rhythm again, I’m not sure I will NOT like it. I’ve seen it happen before: busy season with lots of projects: I run to Nirvana to help me manage the chaos. So that’s probably a lesson learned. I understand the advantages of not linking actions to projects, but I really prefer them linked. It kinda feels unstructured to me if they are not. It’s all about preference.
• No start dates: all dates in Todoist are due dates. I could use some “due dates” to indicate a future date when I want to look at certain item, but it will create confusion in my brain. Again, I’m used to Nirvana’s “Scheduled” actions feature.
• Because Todoist is so focused on scheduling tasks and due dates everywhere, I feel like it blurs the edges between Calendar and Next Actions. I know I could just ignore this feature, but it’s so tempting to add due dates for everything!

Anyway, I will test it for a couple more days and see how I feel about it.

—

Post 24/100 of 100DaysToOffload challenge (Round 2)!

#100DaysToOffload #100Days #Productivity #apps #GTD #Todoist

Thoughts? Discuss... if you have a Write.as account or Reply by email

---

By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

• 🌞 I’m enjoying Summer this year! Having lived most of my life in Brazil, summer was my least favorite season because summers there are brutal! I think this here in my corner of Canada summer has been manageable. Of course, having a house with central AC helps a lot. We don’t try to get our house too cold; we keep it at 23-24C just so that we have AC running a few times to get rid of humidity and keep the house at a comfortable temperature. We use AC in conjunction with ceiling fans and it works well to keep our house cool and lower energy consumption.
• 🧩 Our Ancient Map puzzle is framed! We couldn’t find the right frame size at IKEA, so we got a frame at Michaels, and it was the perfect size. Now I know that Michaels has a huge variety of frames. The framed puzzle is at my reading corner. I loved it!
• 🛌 Me and my partner had a few errands to do this week. One of them included searching for a new mattress for our bed. We are still searching. We went to one store, and we want to go to at least one more to compare.
• 👟 My left toe blister disappeared this week. I went for walks during the week and on Sunday I ventured going out for a run and it was okay. I ran 7km with a slower pace of 7.26min/km (partly because I didn’t want to exert myself and because it was so hot! 🥵). I ran with my old pair of shoes. I didn’t have time to go to the specialized running store to get a new pair of running shoes yet. It’s next on my list!
• 🛋️ We finally got a ceiling fan for our living room to replace an old badly installed ceiling lamp assembly that was left by the previous house owner. Looking better now! This was the last room we wanted to install a ceiling fan in the house.
• ✅ I got frustrated (and bored) with Nirvana as my to-do app. I had some ideas on how to make my tasks system simpler and easier to use with less limitations. So, yeah, I looked at Todoist again and I got a new setup I’m testing. I’ll write a post describing it later this week.

Post 23/100 of 100DaysToOffload challenge (Round 2)!

#100DaysToOffload #100Days #weeknotes

Thoughts? Discuss... if you have a Write.as account or Reply by email

---

By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.