Get Everything Done

Up until around February, when I commenced a new slew of experimentations, I had for a longer duration a very versatile system running, which served me very well, with one exception.

This system was Simple Scanning (sisc) in a terrific notebook, custom made for writing.

The paper of the notebook was fun. It had numbered pages, lines and a date field at the top of every page. By filling out said date field, I could always examine, after which date I had done a recurring task the last time – but not without leaving doubt, pinpoint the exact day on which I had done it.

It was still fun to flip through the pages to see when I had started a specific page and to see for how long it had remained with me.

So, when I switched to a digital system, while still keeping the use of sisc, my first impulse was to have one big (digital) list and thus leaving the concept of a "page" behind me. But that proved to be unfeasible, since the finding of the spot in the list where I had left before re-entering a tasks at the bottom of the list just took too long.

Pages helped with that and also made the handling of the diverse apps and programs I tried out easier. I settled on a page length of 24 tasks for nostalgic reasons: a (computer) terminal used to have 24 lines, so in the mind of some there exist some sort of a standard there.

I settled on a program which marks the done tasks with a strikethrough effect. The programs who would only show a task as done via a checkmark symbol or some such, did not provide enough "punch" for the feeling of checking off being elevating enough to me. Some apps would hide the done tasks entirely, which does not work well with the concept of the Long List, if it does at all.

While I missed the many joys of handwriting with a pen, fonts and keyboards provide another set of pleasantries. These however lend themselves to write more words and signs and wonders, so the list tends to become stylized with many of them.

A catalogue of recurring items would emerge, letting each recurring task carry a number, by which I could observe a task to denote the same work, even though it's wording may have changed since the last time I notched it down. This catalogue serves as a map of work that is already successfully integrated into my daily and weekly routines.

The computer program also notes automatically, when I marked each task as done, giving me thus the chance to be a secret service with the task of observing me and accomplishing that task perfectly. I could also already convince the tax payer, me, to support this program, when I bought the app. We are seeing thus an instance of sisc influencing the politics of a single household.

It is now possible for me to see what I did each day, automatically, while using a Long List format and neither DIT nor a No List system. This is something that I quite like.

I now have an habit tracker inbuilt into the Long List. I can annotate a task with a counter – as an example: "reading War & Peace daily (43)" could mean that I have browsed in War & Peace at least 43 times or maybe 43 days in a row – and to that counter a date stamp would be added. This is just one way to do it, mind you, but it shows that all needed data is at hand.

While the swiftness and the feel of handling paper is lost, I also gained a few "digital" advantages. I can't say that I like a digital system better than a low-tech one in any case, but I do like my current setup, which happens to be digital, very much.

One of the main advantages of a paper notebook is that you have a "station" away from the noisiness of social media and all that other computer crap. It also frees the computer from the task of having to administer the task list, which can provide for a nicer and more distinct feel of working at the computer.

This main advantage was also the one thing in which the paper based sisc setup could not satisfy me. For the time being, I can accomplish virtually all my tasks at my laptop computer. This is nice, because it allows me to work wherever I like to. It also prerequisites me carrying the computer around, which is okay, but add to that a paper notebook and the difficulty of arranging a place for writing in it, the whole thing becomes tiresome at times.

So I switched to digital in order to run around with my work.

And also because I wanted to prove to myself that I could make sisc work at the computer.