22.00.0034: The classes of to-do

johnnydecimal · May 3, 2024, 1:34am

As in, what types of to-do are there.

death.au · May 3, 2024, 6:53am

I like the feel of this, and where it could be going.
Tasks are something I’ve struggled with for a long time. I have never, in my entire life, found a system that works for me. It’s a big pain point. Things get lost, or put off (and then lost in a shame spiral) or procrastinated on…

I like the distinction here between MUST (P1), SHOULD (P2-P3) and MAY (P4), and how they all live in different systems, managed differently. Keep all the P4s around without the shame/anxiety of seeing them alongside your P1s and getting overwhelmed with all the things you have to do.

I’m interested to see where you end up going with the “orthogonality” of scheduled tasks and how one works with nebulous scheduling (e.g. Feed the neighbour’s cat at some point in the evening).

I’m also interested to see how it ties in with your index card system; the analog, paper, “stuff I’m doing right now” tasks.

Basically, I’ve got a lot of task management stuff on my mind right now, swirling around, just waiting for a few more ingredients/catalysts to coalesce into something that would be actually useful.

johnnydecimal · May 3, 2024, 7:26am

In a way it feels funny to be thinking about this again. Surely this is a solved problem?

But, obviously not. And I think it’s a problem that adjusts with us over time. Ten years ago maybe a simple GTD methodology worked. But then we got always-with-us devices and home assistants that record anything we shout at them and literally dozens more to-do apps.

The landscape isn’t, well, a landscape. Because landscapes tend to be static. It’s more like an ocean. A swirling ocean of okay enough of this terrible metaphor…

I’m thinking about this a lot at the moment. Like, most of the day. I want to bring it back to basics. It’s not about the tools. I firmly believe that with the right process you could do this with a plain text file or a stack of index cards and Post-it notes.

A realisation from a walk earlier today: it’s not like we’ve had this surfeit of ‘productivity apps’ forever. And yet people seem to have managed to ‘get things done’ in the past.

So yeah, I’ll keep throwing ideas here, and this is all in service of making Lucy organised so it’ll be in the workshop. But it is an evolving idea so please bear with me, and I appreciate all the input.

johnnydecimal · May 3, 2024, 7:27am

This deserves its own

PhillyChuck · May 3, 2024, 10:12am

Funny to see this come up now. I’ve just decided to refactor my Omnifocus tasks using the Eisenhower matrix (https://www.eisenhower.me/eisenhower-matrix/) which is very similar to what you are describing.

metanoid · May 6, 2024, 7:56am

I keep coming back to a ‘Bullet Journal’ style of doing things. In my notebook, I have a Month Ahead page for tasks “Scheduled” more than a week ahead, a Next Week page for Nice To Do’s (P3), a page for each Day of the next 7 days, with P1 tasks listed at the top of the page, written top down, and P2 tasks listed at the bottom of the page, written bottom up - if these ever meet then I know I’m being too optimistic, and I move some P2’s to the next Day page. I also have a couple of pages dedicated to “Unplanned Missions” which would be the P4’s - these are ambitions I have not yet committed to do.

Reading this blog post has made me realise a few flaws in my current system.

I have too many P1’s - even if the ‘project’ is important, not every task for that project is important
It would be better to work on “tomorrow’s” P1s than “today’s” P2s most of the time.
Once a week I have to move all the P3’s I didn’t do to the next Next Week page, which just means I have to feel guilty once a week for no gain.

The advantage of keeping everything in a journal is that nothing ever gets lost. The disadvantage is that I end up looking at all the things I haven’t done proportionally more than I look at the things I have done.

benberry.design · May 7, 2024, 8:13pm

Things 3 + pen & paper has been working well for me with this. Was an avid Apple Reminders user but I didn’t like how hard it shamed you when something that you assigned a date to was overdue. Like, that thing wasn’t that important, I just wanted it on my to-do list yesterday

johnnydecimal · May 7, 2024, 8:53pm

Yeah I’ve been trying to use Reminders just to get better at it, and there’s a lot about it that I don’t love.

We’re a HomePod house though and damn is it convenient being able to shout at Siri and have it go in your reminders. I know you can get it to send those to Things or whatever but it’s not as nice or reliable.

Things’ Today view, where you choose what goes there — no shame, no nagging! — is a great innovation. Lucy uses it heavily. You can recreate it in Reminders using a tag and a smart folder…

benberry.design · May 7, 2024, 9:13pm

Yes, I still use reminders as a sort of capture system with Siri, but end up managing most of my project tasks in Things. Both have their strengths & weaknesses. When it all gets too much I just whip out a notebook

paulg · May 11, 2024, 7:40am

I use a MYN system (Master Your Now) by Michael Linenberger. I’ve never heard it mentioned by anyone online and have no idea why it’s not more popular. I combine it with GTD methodology to manage my tasks and email.

To cut a long story short;

P1 tasks are “Critical Now”, limited to 5 (as opposed to Catastrophic, lol)
P2 tasks are “Opportunity Now”, which are tasks that you could do, but can wait until the critical tasks for the day are complete (max. 20)
P3 tasks are “Over-the-Horizon”, and hidden from view until you are ready to promote them to your Today view, so you don’t feel overwhelmed by a huge backlog of things to do.

Obviously there’s more to it, and Michael has some excellent guides to set up a system using Todoist and similar apps, but I find it to be simple and I structure my actionable email the same way, using Red flags for P1 tasks on my Mac, Orange for P2s and Blue for Over the Horizon … plus a few colours for Waiting For, Read Later and Bills/Finance, that I go through every Saturday during a weekly review.

johnnydecimal · May 11, 2024, 7:56am

Will check it out. I’m in to this 2011 web page!

https://www.michaellinenberger.com/AboutMYN.html

paulg · May 11, 2024, 8:17am

Oh that’s right, it’s been a while since I was on his site. That’s probably why it’s not as popular as it could be!

Here is the page for Todoist
https://www.michaellinenberger.com/MYN-Todoist/

And one for Things

I think I bought the Todoist course a couple of years ago so it’s not too old.
The website sucks but the content is pretty good.

johnnydecimal · July 1, 2024, 10:50pm

Note: was going to post this as a reply in this thread but given how long it got, I’m going to move it over to where you’re reading it now.

I spent most of yesterday thinking about this. I’ll type out some thoughts here as it might help them crystallise in my mind.

We start with the classes of to-do [22.00.0034]. Read that if you haven’t.

In my mind I’m still using this P1–P4 idea. How do we feel about that, generally? It makes an internal monologue really quick! But if you didn’t once run helpdesks for a living it might not be so obvious.

P4: not really a thing to-do (yet)

So P4s are easy. They’re not actually things ‘to-do’, or if they are, you haven’t decided that you really want to do them yet. You might, in the future. For now they’re ideas, thoughts, lists, hopes, dreams, notes, something you just don’t want to lose.

@LucyDecimal system was ~90% P4s. She loves a list. Here’s a selection of mine from my re-grouping exercise yesterday:

Re-think your iOS device home screens. Align with macOS desktop widgets?
Tidy up your Airtable bases. Rename them, consolidate icon colours, and archive some old stuff.
Gift idea: buy [someone] [thing].
Make a trout & bean salad in summer.

The key with P4s is that there is absolutely no consequence whatsoever if they don’t get done. If they all burned in a fire you’d be sad, but nothing bad would happen.

I am therefore convinced that P4s MUST NOT live in your task system. They’re a bullet point in a note.

P1s: critically time sensitive

I’ll jump straight to P1s because they’re also easy. These are things that absolutely must happen and usually before a certain time.

That time is usually quite soon – pick Jemima up from saxophone practice – or regularly – pay the rent.

I only have one P1 and it is to check the account we use to pay our rent and bills, which is not our primary account, to make sure that there’s enough in it. We keep it at or near that amount as it doesn’t earn interest etc. So each month, on the last day of the month, Due goes off and tells me to do this.

So I think P1s MUST live in their own little world. You have so few. If you have five that’s probably too many. Unless you have six kids and they all love learning brass instruments and none of them can catch the bus. But you get the idea. Use sparingly.

Because when I see Due, I never ignore Due.^[1] Past me has sent me a message: this one is really important. Drop everything else.

P2s & P3s: the difficult part in the middle

Here’s where it gets harder.

First, one class of to-do that we can safely handle.

Project tasks

A project task is a task in service of getting a project done. Step 89 of 121 things. It’s not some isolated thing like pick Jemima up.

As a broad rule, I think these tasks can be lumped together. When you sit down to get Project Shoehorn done, you look at your list of tasks and you work through it. Perhaps some of those tasks need to be pushed out to the future and so we need to handle them differently, but a lot of them do not.

Don’t clutter your P2/P3 task system with project tasks. They can probably be bullet points in a note.

Criteria for P2/P3

So the criteria for something to be a P2/P3 is that if you do not do it, there is a consequence.

That consequence might not be grave. It might just be that you feel worse about yourself. But, in your estimation, it exists.

So the question then is, what gets to interrupt you? I say only a P2 is allowed to do that: to put a notification somewhere in your life.

Because it is these notifications that are the curse. As soon as they exceed some very low threshold, they cease to be useful. Worse: they’re harmful because there is something you really should do in there, but it’s drowned in a sea of other stuff.

My stuff from yesterday

Yesterday — I wish I’d taken a screenshot, damn — I checked off 6 or 7 items that had been sitting as past-due to-dos in my system.^[2] Not one of them had a genuine reason to be there.

Some of them were things that I should periodically do: update the forum software. If I leave that too long, it becomes harder or breaks. There is a consequence to my forum not working.

Some of them were things that I wanted to remember while I was out on a walk, and I just asked Siri to remind me this afternoon to… and that action was still there days later.

Back to notifications

Let’s pretend notifications didn’t exist. What would we do?

We’d write down the things we had to-do.
We’d try to group these to-dos in to sensible buckets of similar stuff.
- Maybe on different pages of a notebook?
We’d remember, on some sort of cycle, to look at each of the pages.
We might either:
- Just do all the stuff from one page on one day, or
- Pull important things from different pages to a new page, and focus on that stuff.

Now substitute:

‘sensible buckets of similar stuff’ for ‘your Johnny.Decimal categories’, and
‘pages of a notebook’ for ‘folders in your to-do system’, and
‘remember, on some sort of cycle’ for ‘scheduling time in your calendar’,

and we have the beginnings of a system.

Should anything get to interrupt you?

What I’m struggling with here is, is there actually a difference between P2 & P3? My first thought was that P2s should be allowed to interrupt you. But the more I think on it, the more I doubt this approach.

Here’s a P2 that I have: check my credit card before the 15th of the month and, if there’s anything to pay, pay it.

I consider that a P2 because if I don’t pay, that affects my credit rating, which is a long-term thing that I can’t easily undo. Compared to a P3 which is to check that some company processed a refund as promised and I got the $50 back. If I don’t do that and they forget, I stand to lose $50. But I consider that a lower consequence than a bad credit rating.

But back to interruptions. If I’m organised, and things are in neat buckets, and I trust myself to look at them regularly, why would any of them need to interrupt me?

Do categories of stuff at the same time

I need to pay my credit card at some point before the 15th. Not on the 15th. So do it every month on the 10th. And while I’m there, check all the other financial related stuff.

It’s all boring, you might as well just get in a zone and do it all at once.

Now, the problem comes when you decided you’d do this on Friday at 14:00, like I did last week, then this time rolls round and you were doing something else, and you didn’t actually do it.

But I wonder: could I make life simpler, calmer, more reliable, if instead of considering that as 5 things ‘to-do’ — credit card, rent, etc. — could it just be 1 thing, which is monthly financial processing.

Don’t just do things randomly

Because here’s another consideration. (Sorry, I know this is long. I don’t mind if you’ve given up.)

I had a task: print your iCloud account recovery kit. I wrote that on a piece of paper on my desk.

Yesterday, I found that piece of paper. But, damned if I wasn’t sure I’d done that thing. But did I? I didn’t crumple the paper up, it’s still here in the list. Ugh. So I get out the locked box and check and, yeah, I did it. What a waste of mental energy that was.

So don’t just do things as they occur to you. No! Write them down, or check whether you already have them written down.

Put them in their categories with their friends. You know they can wait: there was no urgency whatsoever to me printing that thing.

And get to them in the cycle.

So are P2s just higher in the (same) list than P3s?

I wonder then if P2/P3 isn’t just one list — as in, one list per category — that needs to be looked at on a cycle.

And if the P2s aren’t just higher on that list than the P3s. You do them first, because they’re more important.

Check the rent account. Then if you’ve still got time/energy, you get to the lower stuff. Did you get that $50 refund?

When I was thinking about this yesterday, I couldn’t think of a situation where a P2 should be allowed to interrupt you.

Work in progress

There’s more to think about here, but I’d appreciate any thoughts.

And the reason I use Due for this is because it makes it impossible to ignore. Its standout feature is that it reminds you over and over to do the thing until you dismiss it; unlike most task management apps which remind you once. It’s a great app that I’ve used for over a decade. ↩︎
And when I say ‘checked off’, I don’t mean ‘done’. I just checked them off! ↩︎

johnnydecimal · July 2, 2024, 12:04am

To consider: things in the far future.

Review Zoom account, which will renew for AU$223 on 8th November.

That needs some sort of date fence, but I’m not sure how to implement that? This is the sort of task I don’t even want to think about until October. But then, in October, it just falls in to my Financial category as a thing to-do.

And this feels more P2 than P3. Simply because AU$223 is a lot of money to proactively spend just because I forgot not to.

Existing software – OmniFocus is the champion here – can do this defer a task until the future thing. But I really want to find a way to do this without using special tools. Pare it back to the essence of the thing, y’know?

clappingcactus · July 2, 2024, 3:14pm

For me I think the separation of P2/P3/P4 is unnecessary. Either something has to be done or it’s optional. Optional stuff goes on an “if I have free time” list. Obligatory stuff goes in a “deadlines” or “to-do” list.

Almost nothing is allowed on my deadlines list, doubly impossible to get there if you’re not my boss.

I completely agree with this, both for inbox processing and JD area processing purposes. It allows me to have somewhere to put a new thought as soon as it comes in of something I’d like to do. It then allows me at a later time to sit down and see how I feel about any given JD category and where I want to take it next.

No! I think this is the golden opportunity of organizing tasks by JD ID.

For me I have 7 main JD IDs I access regularly that are concerned with physical spaces I am responsible for. I then schedule them each on one day of the week. I know every week on Tuesdays I will do something for the house. Precisely what will I do? I don’t know. I’m going to sit on Monday night and ask myself if any deadlines are coming up and I should act, and if none exist, then I ask myself where I think the next 80% of value for my house life would come from and pick an item that corresponds to that from the list.

Today, it was seeing if I want to change energy/gas providers, I found one I like and made a note for myself in the winter to check again if it’s more economical to switch. I also did the laundry in the morning. If tomorrow something comes up for home maintenance, I only have to ask myself “can this wait at least a week?” And if so, it goes on my optional items list.

Yes, that’s the JD magic. I know I have time scheduled weekly ahead for finances (dealing with banks and/or clinics is Thursdays). This means two things. First, I know when the next earliest opportunity to worry about something will be and always have a day in mind to suggest if someone asks me for something. Second, I know I don’t have to worry about anything right now this moment except what I have decided to do. Everything is on autopilot. I will get to it and nothing is slipping through the cracks.

I do think things might slip through the cracks if I had 4 lists, though… I don’t think I have the presence of mind (maybe everyone else can but just not me) to integrate 4 lists into a single narrative of what I have to do on a specific day.

One level of scheduling up…

I’ve broken down the kind of personal development projects I like into 6 main JD areas.

The year then gets broken down into two 6-month chunks. Each month is some kind of project that I suspect would take me at least 60-90 hours to complete. This is my own personal fun stuff. Learning something new or doing something new with something I recently learned.

I hate how to-do lists always end up a mess of things I wish I had done earlier, so this “scheduling” allows me to feel like I always have time to work towards the things I hope to accomplish, and sure, the office safety agent really wants me to do some specific training, but that’s Wednesdays are for… Tuesday lunch hour though? That’s my real personal fun time to work on this month’s project.

In my gas provider example above, I put my task to evaluate that cost benefit analysis in November in my “perhaps someday” list. I did write that it costs me £100 per month in the task. I’m not an idiot, right? If I’m checking these task lists weekly I can in the moment choose of there’s anything else to-do on my list worth my time more than that £100. But it’s not a deadline. If I don’t do anything I continue to have gas and electricity at home. It’s just sub-optimized. And that too, it’s a maybe.

If I were personally doing your zoom account, I’d consider breaking it down into two tasks in my someday list
"- October: Is there anything better than Zoom available?

November: Can I switch Zoom to monthly so cancelling it entirely is cheaper than AU$223 if I want to cancel it in the middle of next year?"

These are a lot of rambly thoughts, but I hope something in there is useful for someone.

osau · July 2, 2024, 3:49pm

I have constructed a system inspired by Getting Things Done, P.A.R.A and Johnny Decimal to organize all this. I’m using Things for this, but I think it could be adapted to many other task apps. (It might be a little difficult to follow if you don’t know the Things nomenclature – sorry about that)

I’m sort of dumping it here, in case it provides any ideas to someone.

Structure

My structure in Things look like this:

Projects
- 12.08 A trip to the mountains
- 13.15 Run a marathon
- 22.12 Fix a thing with the house
Areas
- 10-19 Family
- 20-29 Property

I’ve taken the advice to treat projects as a J.D. ID. It’s a little awkward, because it’s not obvious whether an ID is a project or not, but it works well enough. I can’t look in my index and quickly find all projects. I can of course instead go to my task app and find all ongoing (and completed) projects there, which serves as a kind of specialized index.

Tasks which does not fit inside a project is added to their J.D. area. I found breaking it down to categories was more detail than I needed, and made prioritizing and, notably, overviewing difficult.

You could argue that I should maybe use the standard zeros and have 10.03 Family todos, but since I keep all todos in a single app, I find this a little clearer.

Problems I have solved

Here are the problems I consider have solved, for me. Most of this comes from GTD.

I want to work effectively and not constantly need to refocus or re-prioritize. Example: When I’m downtown I want to do all errands needed, even if they might not be very prioritized.
- I do weekly and monthly reviews where I go through the things listed below. (Of course what I need to do is kept in 03.01 Review checklists) The weekly review is responsible to moving things between Anytime and Someday. In day-to-day life I only look at Anytime and it must be easy to overview. When I go downtown I would either a) check my todos for a context tag (@downtown), or b) when I have planned I’m going I might go through my tasks (perhaps during the weekly review) and then schedule the tasks for that day. If there is a time aspect (like its better if I run the errand on my lunch break) I will set a reminder, at least for one of the tasks.
I want to keep track of things with loose dates. Example: I want to prune some shrubs in April next year.
- I have dedicated tags for each month. I do a monthly review where I move all tasks tagged with next month to Anytime. Pruning the shrubs would get the >April tag.
I don’t want to miss really important stuff, and I want obligations (and todos in general) to be stress free. Example: Pay credit card bill on time.
- Really important stuff gets a deadline. Deadlines are only given when there is a consequence if it’s not done, and only when there is a specific date for when it’s due. Paying the credit card bill would get a deadline the day before it’s payment is due. I might set a reminder.

Problems I haven’t solved

There are still some things I struggle with managing.

Future ideas and projects. Maybe I should have a Sparklist and make it part of my monthly review?
I’m still very focused on doing tasks which are scheduled. I’m not very good at periodically look at Anytime and work on a task from there. I tend to fill my day with ”BAU work”. ^[1] I think I just need to be more conscious of this and try to get it as a habit.
I don’t know how to treat BAU work, and its inevitable overlap with projects and areas/categories. How do you prioritize between BAU work and your todo list? Time boxing?
It’s difficult to prioritize between an important project containing many unimportant tasks (the whole is greater than the sum of its parts) and a single half-important task.

Summary

Typing all this out made me realize there is quite some detail in how I use it. I like the simplicity of P1-P4. It feels pretty structured; you put things in buckets and depending on bucket you have a clearly defined set of rules.
Mine is a lot harder to define. I will consider using P1-P4 to guide my reviews.

Business As Usual work is the stuff that we just (need to) do everyday, even if it’s not on a task list. If you are a programming this might be coding, if you are an artist it might be designing, if you work at all you probably spend a lot of time in meetings and serving other peoples requests. Dan North wrote about this. ↩︎

osau · July 7, 2024, 9:02am

I’ve been giving this more thought. (This time with less fever – sorry about my rambling)

I should say I’m very absent minded and rely pretty heavily on lists. Our use cases might be different.

I’m curious how you reason about tasks that doesn’t have consequences, but you (or other) find value in having them done? “Features”, if you like. Do you file these things as tasks, or are all those P4? How to weigh benefits against negative consequences?

The other thing I’m curious about is how you weigh in on time frames. If a task is less urgent but important, how is that contrasted with a lower priority task that is due sooner?

(The latter is one of the reasons I lean towards only three buckets – I end up comparing apples to oranges and can’t prioritize between them)

It would be interesting to hear how much stuff you have in your lists, and how you reason about quantity. I think that would help me understand how you use todo lists.

cobblepot · July 25, 2024, 12:45am

Comment on your task/to-do blog post:

I hope this doesn’t come across as negative, but I really think it’s a mistake to try to make JD include tasks. Tasks and organizing are related but distinct domains, and there are countless task/project planning systems and people have spent thousands of hours discussing them. Tasks have many requirements that organization doesn’t. Why open that can of worms? You often comment on how you have a long to-do list; doesn’t it make sense to spend your time focused on improving JD itself for its core functions rather than expanding it to a “new-to-you but decades old and super-complicated” domain?

More specifically on the blog post, your P1-P4 system (to me) conflates the notions of urgency and importance. Some systems, like Mark Forster’s, see that as fine (he says you ultimately need to do everything on your task list or it shouldn’t be on it), and other popular systems, like Covey’s, say that’s a sin and you need a 2x2 urgency-importance matrix. My point here isn’t that you are wrong, but just circling back to the point that this is a black hold I suggest you not jump into until you really feel that you have JD totally where you want it to be.

johnnydecimal · July 25, 2024, 5:58am

Yeah, there’s a reason we haven’t started workshop area 60-69 yet. Because it tackles this issue.

It’s an interesting point, and thanks for raising it. The problem is that ‘to-dos’ is such an integral part of our lives these days. You can’t sit down at your computer without knowing what ‘to do’. Otherwise why are you there?

And, personally, it’s one that I want to solve. I struggle with this. I don’t want to. There has to be a way.

But, yeah. You make a compelling argument. I’ll think on it.