Get Everything Done

I switched to ToodleDo a few months ago, with 1MTD and my new tablet. I was excited about sorting by date entered or by urgency or due date or arbitrary priority. It worked for a week or two. Just long enough to move most of my system over. Then the video game hit, and I can't blame the system for that.

Now that I'm rebuilding habits, I'm not excited about digital. There's something about pen and paper that I find reliable and relaxing. Things stay put in order entered. With ToodleDo, I kept playing with the prioritization. Monthly cleaning is low priority early in the month, but grows over time, then after I do it, the next recurrence is low priority. Creating a hot list worked better.

When I do a daily report, typing feels permanent (probably because I rarely delete things and know they'll be on the backup). Writing on paper is ephemeral because when a book is finished I throw it out (after double-checking each remaining page and filing when necessary). That's opposite intuition, which says bytes are ephemeral and paper permanent.

Yet making a digital todo list feels ephemeral. One click and it changes. Yes, it changes because I wanted a different order, but that's still change. On paper, it stays put.

Working on only the first and last pages (or blocks) worries me. I have lots of things in the middle that need attention. Like AndreasE, I tend to work for quite a while on a task, so don't cycle through the pages very often. Many days, I don't leave the hot list (which includes tasks from the middle of the book).

Grrr. Typed two different replies. Deleted the first because writing it caused me to realize it wasn't accurate. Didn't check if it needed the captcha for the second.

If I had to get things done before they entered the Sargasso Sea of the mid-list, I might start out doing everything on the current page and burn myself out. I'd probably do things too quickly to be quality, and do things that a few days rest would show weren't important in the first place.

My mid-list is huge, and my oldest task is very old. I don't want to hibernate it, though, because it's for someone else. Trying to prioritize them doesn't work, since my feelings about them change too often.

I like the idea of the oldest page getting more attention. I tend to hop between oldest tasks. None get done, and none get the benefit of momentum, and they all sit there and drain my will to work on anything else. "Oldest, deal with it" might help, especially if I leave it where it is -- in the oldest spot. Similar to Current Initiative.

I think "minimal work on the mid-list" would work well if the mid-list were short, so things moved to the "oldest" position fairly quickly. To convert to a shorter mid-list, I'd have to start my list from scratch. I keep thinking I should start my list over, using this method, and backlog everything in my current list that can be backlogged, but it's too daunting. There's too wide a variety of deadlines and goals in it to be backlogged in a single chunk, or even to be sorted.