I managed to get too many plates spinning again, and made it worse for myself by trying very hard to use Asana, because it’s what we use for a few things at work and it’s easier to send todos back and forth in 1:1 and team boards. My own personal project board isn’t great and I vacillate between a column view and list view, but the fact is Asana just makes my brain freeze. I do not like it. It doesn’t matter how I arrange the view.
I think it is extra infuriating to me because I recently tried to add a project status field and noticed that easily ten of my coworkers had each created their own custom “red/yellow/green” status fields and added them to the collective library. They’re all just red/yellow/green. Not other metadata, no nothing. You can’t have not seen the other nine in the library in the process of deciding to make your own, but here we are. People are animals.
But too many plates, and I was feeling miserable and behind, so I opened up a fresh org-mode buffer and started outlining it all instead of trying to make it into little tasks or cards or whatever.
I keep coming back to something I love about org-mode: You can dip in and out of planning and writing about what you’re planning so easily: One second you’re defining a TODO, the next line down you’re writing about it. No dipping into a notes box, etc. If a paragraph into the whole thing you think of a few extraneous tasks, make them checkboxes, keep writing, and add a cookie to the parent when you think of it so you can see completion. Decide a thing needs to get parked … org-refile it to the * Parked heading and keep moving. Setting priority is just S-up or S-down.
The only thing I regret is having to re-learn this over and over. There is a little extra overhead to keep an org project file and also do the necessary ticketing in Asana to keep things going with the team, but I can’t think in Asana, I can just track there. Different things.