ToDos, Things and small Resentments

On March 22, 2011 1 Comments - Thoughts & Musings

I love todo lists. Always did, always will do.
ToDo-Lists and me, we’ve got a long, fruitful relationship.

These days I house them in the iPhone-app Things. It’s pretty neat little program; swift, does what it’s told, doesn’t do what it’s not supposed to do and using it makes me happy. Weee. My notes for Traces of Chaos live in Things and so do my blog ideas, my shopping list and even strange, small reminders like “write your diary” and “take your thyroid medicamentation” and “remember to transfer your student loan payment.”1.

At first Things seems to be a pretty complicated system, with projects and project areas, active, inactive and timed tasks, the ability to tag tasks and blah, blah, blah2 – but in the end using it boils down to two little rules:

  • Only keep stuff you’re activly working on as active projects; the someday List is your friend.
  • Don’t mark too many tasks as “do today”

The Böbbel

One thing Things3 does is to put a smallish, but tremedeously ANGRY red Böbbel at the upper right of your Things Icon showing you how many tasks you’ve flagged as “Do Today” are still left. It’s prolly a good thing for many people.

Now, I’ve got quite a contrarian nature. I’m stubborn. I know that. Try to tell me what to do, no matter how you phrase it, I’ll resist out of principle. It’s a streak that has gotten me into as much trouble as it has solved problems, but there you go. I’ll happily work on my own, puzzle around until a solution is found or I am ready to ask for help – but try to force something on me, advice or otherwise, and I’ll out-stubborn a mule.

And now there was that angry red Böbbel full of righteous indignation, yelling “Here! HERE! So many tasks you’ve flagged! LOOSER. So much stuff you’ve still got to do. Can you hear me? LAZY ASS.”4

And I went, “Piss off. I know what to do. I’m going to play WoW. :P”

Um, Oops?

Anyway, Things is a sweetheart and a life-saver. It has settings for little-angry-red-Böbbel. You can make it even more angry or you can shut it up and sent it to bed. So I turned it off and I’m happily ticking off my todo-lists again, only checking upon my ToDo lists when I want.

Choice, it’s important.

And sometimes the stumble blocks on the road of productive creativity are small and silly and just as easily overlooked as they can be fixed.

Footnotes:

  1. Sometimes I worry. If I were to loose my iPhone, I’d loose two third of my life-relevant data… But then I remember that it is backed up on my Mac, which in return is backed up on a portable harddrive – and Phew, she says as she swipes her forehead, a crisis is averted. ↩
  2. No wonder, the app’s based on David Allan’s Getting Things Done. Now I fell out with the cult of GTD and its creepier followers some years ago, but I did learn alot from it about working with todo lists. ↩
  3. I still cannot decide if this name’s unfortionate or brilliant. ↩
  4. Metaphorical, of course. I’m not crazy, I swear! Even if I yell at my lists sometimes. ↩

One Comment

  1. The Fiendish Puppy April 14, 2011

    Yes, those red bubbles on apps are configurable… unless it’s one of Apple’s inbuilt ones.

    No, Apple, I don’t want to update any of the apps I haven’t updated, because they’d be worse! Get rid of your red thing, please! >:(

    Yes, I really need to work out a system that I can use to efficiently ensure that I do the things that I want to do.
    Unfortunately I can’t get along with to-do lists, I absolutely despise them! :)

    I’ll work something out, I’m sure :)

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