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I'm not pleased with my current system for managing tasks. I feel it is too cumbersome. Too awkward to use.
I feel it is good, but only if I use it. And I haven't been using it very much recently. The number of tasks I complete each month has been on a decline. Not because I'm necessarily doing less, but because I'm tracking less tasks.
The less I track, the easier it is for things to fall through the cracks. Important things. Opportunities. Bills to pay. Fines to avoid. And so on. Things falling through the cracks can be expensive in more ways than one.
So I'm revamping it ✨
I'm not sure yet what the new version will look like. But it needs to be simpler. Faster to create small tasks, but less overwhelming at the same time.
For this my plan to use contexts.
In Getting Things Done, David Allen describes a context a tool, person, or location you need to complete the task (e.g. office, smartphone, personal trainer, etc). But most of my tasks would be "home" or "computer", so there isn't much value there.
Instead I'm trying contexts such as "admin" and "focus" - they describe the kind of work I'm doing at that point: lighter admin tasks, where I don't need to concentrate as much; or deep focus work where I block out all distractions.
I'm combining this with calendar blocks with the same name, so when I'm in a focus block I can hide all the admin-type tasks.
Another concept I'm adopting is projects. I might call them "quests" though 💎
A task is a tiny, self-contained piece of work, a project is a larger body of work that includes multiple tasks.
My tasks live in my new task manager (based on todo.txt because I love text files!) and projects live in my Obsidian vault (where tasks used to live). This allows me to add more context to projects while keeping the actual tasks pretty small and easy to process.
This is still a work-in-progress. So not sure how it will turn out 🤞
See you tomorrow 👋