I am thinking about doing a small series of posts on how I am managing the chaos that I am trying to stop fighting. I hope the chaos of an ADHD mind can be utilized rather than fought against. So far it has been working out pretty great (for past ~8 months). This post is about how I manage my ever exploding list of things I want to do.
I believe one of the most important things is to externalize your thoughts. Making it a habit to write them down is immensely helpful. So many of my problems stopped being problems as I adopted writing things down more and more. I have very small working memory. I forget often and I forget most things. Mind is always thinking of new ideas, things to do, things to tell people. The knowledge that I am going to forget the thing I am thinking right now is a big source of anxiety. The burden of remembering innumerable things and then failing to do so has a cognitive toll of its own.
I use org-mode as a lot of things; a TODO list is one of them. I am not going to get into the details of using org-mode for a beginner, but I'll share my flow of using org mode as a TODO list.
Capturing things to do
A very useful feature of org-mode is how easy it makes to "capture" TOOD items. I use Emacs as my primary text editor; being a software developer, most of my day time is spent in Emacs. Any time I think of something I [want|have] to do, I capture it with 3 keystrokes and usually immediately refile it under an appropriate heading. I keep 2 TODOs.org files, one for work and one for my personal life.
In my personal TODOs.org file, I keep headings categorizing the kind of thing it is that I want to do; right now, they are =Study, Personal Development, Habits, Projects, Reading List, In Basket"."In Basket" heading keeps things that are quickly done in a day or few, and/or cannot be categorized.
My work TODOs.org carries all my work related tasks, including Jira issues, and general things I want/have to do when I am in the office. I have a TODO item to integrate org-jira, but right now I am manually copying Jira task IDs around like an imbecile.
This is how my org-capture-templates variable looks like right now:
(setq
org-capture-templates
'(("d" "Diary Entry" plain (file+datetree org-agenda-diary-file) "\n<%<%I:%M %p>>\n%?\n")
("f" "Feedback" plain (file+datetree trantor-feedback-file) "\n<%<%I:%M %p>>\n%?\n")
("i" "Idea" entry (file org-ideas-file) "* %?\n%T")
("t" "Todo" entry (file+headline "" "Todos") "* TODO %?\n%U\n[[%F]]")
("c" "Contact" entry (file org-contacts-file) "* %^{Name}\n:PROPERTIES:\n:COMPANY %^{Company}\n:PHONE: %^{Phone}\n:END:")))
Delegating things to future
Org-mode has a brilliant feature of scheduling tasks. It's rare for me to schedule a task for "today"; I delegate stuff to future me. I can capture and file things in any header, and then use org-mode's agenda views to filter out things past-me assigned for today. I try to finish the "today" tasks, and try to stay at peace when I fail to every day. Org-mode also display a count of for how long I've been missing to do a certain task which is a handy reminder that I am falling short on my commitments.
Prioritizing things
Not all tasks are made equal. Although I try my best to not let my "Today" tasks list become too big, sometimes there is simply too much on the plate. In that case, I define priorities for the most important tasks, which are displayed at the top of the list in Day-agenda view.
Tagging items
I often tag my TODO items so I can easily filter them in the agenda view when I want to find things I have to do in some particular context. I often tag things by:
- The person's name who I need to be with for doing something e.g when I want to tell someone something
- The Scrum sprint in which a task need to get done. For this I don't tag each task but instead file my tasks in a "Sprint X" heading which is tagged, and org-mode automatically inherit tags to all the subheadings
- Place where I need to be at for doing something
- Some other task specific metadata that I think can be helpful for finding this task
Finding things to do
Org-mode allow me to write my todo items in any order in any manner; I have several files where I write a lot of stuff, some of it is things to do; most if it isn't. It's crucial to write things down for me, because I know that I am going to forget it. Org-mode is immensely helpful in finding things out when I need it. Org-files being just text files allow me to just grep stuff; which is even more powerful with helm-projectile-grep. But the killer feature for finding out what I am supposed to be doing right now is org's agenda view. It allow me to filter things by time and tags.
Org-mode require you to explicitly add files to a list of org-agenda-files. The agenda views only pick tasks from files in this
list. I have almost all my org files in my agenda list. It also provides
different views for the agenda; the one I am using most these days is
the "Day-agenda" view, and Week-agenda view when I want to plan things
ahead for the week.
On my mobile, I use orgzly android app. I am not too happy with it, but it's the best I've got for now. I've it in my TODO list to create an app focused on org-mode and TODO lists the way I want it to work.