Two years ago I wrote a super simple todo package for Emacs to see whether I could get over my tendency to 1) procrastinate a lot and 2) being annoyed at my tendency to procrastinate.
Reader, you won’t believe the answer: Yes and no. Or rather, no and yes.
That is, I still procrastinate a lot (but less than before), but I’m way less annoyed about it.
As you can clearly see from the Emacs mode line above, I’ve got 27 “new” things on the todo list, 4 things that are “in progress” and… tada! 616 things that have been done!
It cannot be! That’s about one thing per day! (Although it’s more like no things most days and then eight things on a random day.)
I’ve had a look at other todo systems, but like I said two years ago, they seem to be specifically made to enable further procrastination: You can tinker endlessly with priorities, deadlines and arranging things in hierarchies. So you can spend an hour working on your todo list and then feel you’ve really made some progress. Which is a total lie, of course.
And open sores todo lists encourage further meta-tweaking — altering the todo software itself, so that you can add even more features. I’m proud to say that after starting to use it two years ago, I haven’t touched the anddo code even once! Behold the Microsoft Github repo!
So it’s just a list of tasks, and the ones that are new or in progress are shown. You can edit them and add notes, and you can change status, but that’s it. No dates, no priorities, no nothing. Just do it.
This system has really made me actually take care of a lot of annoyances and stuff, but even more importantly: Instead of looking at the lamp that’s sitting on the hall table every day and going “oh yeah, I should hang that on the wall somewhere; I must remember that”, I just put it on the todo list… and then my brain stops doing that every time I see the lamp on the hall table.
The system works!
(And then I might even hang it on the wall one day when I’m in the mood to do something, and I pull up the todo list… I might.)
I sort of… postpone the procrastination.
Anyway. That’s the life hack.