- Life is has lots of inboxes, try and move everything to one place
- i.e.: email to Things inbox, Reminders to Things inbox, your memory to something written down
- Similarly, make it easy to capture things
- I use the Quick Entry dialog on macOS and now the Action Button on the iPhone 15 Pro,
- You'll eventually find yourself doing this all the time
- For you to trust the process and get the most out of it, you need to do the reviews, otherwise none of this will work
- Everything which is made up of one or more task is a project, make it one,
- You can't do everything in the given hours of the day, you'll find you eventually have a certain "capacity"
- For me, this is about 3-4 general life/work admin things
- If you keep bumping tasks along day by day, there's a reason
- You might not want to do it, why?
- Do you actually have everything you need?
- Is it too big? Can you break it down?
- I use Areas for broad life categories which will have (or should end up having) multiple Projects
- e.g.: Current Client Project, Work, Personal, House, Projects (which is every "tech" thing I've got going on, I've never found a better name for it), Super Secret Project(s)
- Projects are everything with more than one task
- They're sometimes long running, but they do need to be complete-able, otherwise it gets depressing,
- Occasionally, if I need more notes I link to a draft in Drafts, which is where I write most of my notes,
- This year, I've tried having projects scoped by time. So, "dotfiles (Q4 2023)" and then at the end I review and see how it went. Unfinished items go into a new project at the end/or get deleted,
- Nearly all Projects are sorted under an Area, except routine things like the Weekly Review
- The Today view is items I'm trying to do today
- I'm not that strict about it, but I do try and close them all off by the end of the day or file them away elsewhere
- The Today view has an Evening section which is helpful for stuff I can't do until the evening, or I'm trying to avoid cluttering up a long list in Today
- Anytime contains tasks that could be started at any point and that don't have a time associated with them
- It's usually where articles and videos end up (newsletters, Patreon, etc)
- Someday are tasks/ideas which have been put aside because I'm not going to do them yet
- I'm a big user of this, as Things acts as a second brain for me,
- Both Areas and Projects can each have their own items in Someday, which helps group them nicely
- Tags are intended for "contexts"
- I rarely use these now, but the most helpful contexts for me were physical locations
- I have "Home", "Office", "Errands", then "Routines", "Calls", "Evening", "Waiting", followed by "Reading", "Writing", Watching",
- I also have a 🔋section with "High" and "Low". I've never really used these,
- In 2023, I find I use "Routines" (for regularly recurring items like the Daily Review), "Evening" (combined with Ben's script to move items to the bottom of Today) and "Watching" (for YouTube/Patreon videos which come in via email)
- Every week, I review everything in Things and ahead into the future
- I typically do this on Sunday afternoon
- These are split into:
- Clear
- Head
- Email (usually the odd email gets left somewhere because I'm avoiding it or similar)
- Inbox
- Current
- What's on Today?
- What's coming up tomorrow?
- Review calendar events for this week and next
- Notes
- Review Drafts
- Review notebook and notes (usually this is a case of throwing out scribbles I've made in places and putting them somewhere better)
- Look ahead
- Walk through projects
- Review Someday list
- Look at Anytime list
- Clear
- Every morning, I review everything new to get me ready for the day
- Check email,
- Process Things Inbox
- See what's on Today and Upcoming
- Check Calendar for Today and Tomorrow
- There's also either Quarterly or Yearly reviews as well, but I don't schedule those but rather do them ad-hoc