(First post, let me know of any cultural "faux pas")
As many others I struggle with managing my day to day/week/month/year/decade, so naturally I'm looking for some kind of TODO-software.
I'm trying to find an open[1] format for todo-items and -lists that has the capability to give recurring todo:s the attribute of "droppable" so that an individual occurrence can be "dropped".
It would also be fantastic if the format has an inbuilt way to keep track of what individual occurrences have been "done" or "dropped"
This would allow me to keep track of things like:
- Medicines: recurring (sometimes many times a day) with a fairly small window if opportunity, if I don't take them it should be noted but there is no way to do it later so it should be "dropped" from the main-list.
- Bills: recurring with a few days of being actionable (depending on when I get paid and the bills due date), if I don't pay them it should be made higher priority until I pay them, this should also be kept track of.
- Cleaning windows: recurring, with a big window of opportunity, but if this particular spring is a bad one it doesn't matter, this should be dropped and there is no need to keep track of it.
- Things that are considered "habits" (like personal hygiene, exercise, cleaning, practicing musical instruments, etc). These should be dropped and tracked.
The goal is to be able to produce a fairly short list of things that I can[2] do right now and absolutely bury things I can't or shouldn't do.
If there isn't any decent format I will most likely just force one of the two mentioned with some kind of appropriate extension.
/Kruffa
[1] open in this context would be some kind of standard like VTODO or just openly available like todo.txt
[2] can as in MUST / SHOULD / MAY
While I'm not primarily looking for a discussion about strategy I do understand it's inevitable, so...
While this seems like a great strategy for you, it isn't for me, I've tried this and many other strategies and failed at all.
I'm looking for this specific capabilty in the format because what I need is a low-stakes way to get back on the horse. And from my research and knowledge about myself this requirement ("forget if not done") is the best I can work with. If you have ideas or systems that deal with this I'm open to discuss them
I don't really need help when things are going well, but I will fail and I will drop all the balls and almost everything else for a few months for reasons, some days I will forget if I took my 08:00 medication or if I have eaten. Some weeks I wont be able to call my mother to check on her or my friends to make plans.
I need a place to see 3-5 meaningful things I can do right now, because if there are too many I get overwhelmed. If there is a long list of things I haven't done I get too discouraged or if I have to start by figuring out what to do I get stuck on finding the best thing.
So, while I'm glad you can manage to just fucking do it, I can't.
I understand. I've been like you every now and then.
AFAIK after Getting Things Done appeared in the beginning of the email era, nobody found a definitive alternative for 20 years. And the GTD way of doing time constraints is "put it in the calendar".
While each person has their own way of doing things, I'd be surprised if there were a revolutionary alternative to this.