Today was the first day in a little while that I had a true “heads down” day to truly dig in on the backlog I’ve been storing in Taskwarrior: No scheduled meetings, a painful awareness I’m behind on a few things, and a vague unease over the fact that unstructured time is my biggest enemy.
It was off to a good start, though, when I just made sure I was in the right context in TW and got ready to dig in: task context:work filtered out the non-work stuff, and all my “today” stuff was red, with tasks from my current focus project in yellow. Very easy to be clear on what I’d committed to or what the best things to pull forward would be if I exhausted the day’s list, and it helped me spot things that I knew I’d need to rethink as I worked through the focus project and future tasks were affected by current work.
It’s one thing to sort of develop a model in your head and get it set up. It’s another thing to nibble around the edges with a little use here and there while you’re figuring out the model. It’s a completely other thing to have a long stretch of time in front of you where it’s just you and the system and an opportunity to do all the things with it.
So glad I took an axe to the default color scheme and made a much more simplified one. I felt pretty relaxed having only maybe four status colors to deal with for “today,” “next few days,” “projects,” and “all the rest.”
I’m glad I’ve taken the time to set up simple shell aliases to make some tagging implicit. It was easy to capture stuff as it came in via Slack, etc. and when I took a pause mid-day to triage some of the incoming it was easy to start from the bottom and retag/add to projects/etc. I’m okay with a very linear list of tasks with high resolution at the top and very little at the bottom.
I wasn’t sure how I’d deal with the wall of tasks I get when I have a minimal filter in place and run the basic list. But after a day of checking in with it, I realized I really like it: Yep, there’s a lot to do, but I do really poorly with tools that tidy things up, hide next steps, etc. I know GTD theory says “don’t try to keep it all in your head,” but I appreciate the reinforcement and feel less likely to have something languish because it’s out of sight, and I like the opportunity to make a random connection.
On that last point, for instance, one of the folks on my team shared some concerns about their career growth. I made the concern a task, because I owe a conversation about that, and I made it a p1 so it gets a brighter color treatment, and as I worked through a couple of strategic projects today, whenever I checked back in with my list, there was that bright orange, unscheduled p1 sitting down there reminding me that as I think about the big picture I’ve got to also pull some things into its wake. There are some things you can’t compartmentalize.
I think TW has some features that would allow me to get to a bit more of a “only see as much as you need to take the next step” state without losing sight of stuff, but one piece of meta awareness I’m bringing to this iteration is that leaving features on the table is healthy. The mental complexity people describe when they talk about their “productivity methodologies” always leaves me feeling skeptical that the system they’re describing is sustainable or helpful. One reason I’ve always appreciated Things in the Things/OmniFocus debate is that Things does a better job of sort of tucking away all the options unless you choose to use them. Maybe OmniFocus has improved in this regard, but it always felt more willing to expose all the knobs and dials.
So, great experience. I don’t have a ton of them next week owing to the compressed holiday timeline, but I do have a few stretches of time, and I’m already feeling a little less of the nervousness I feel when I see I’ve got some hours to fill.