Post an unproductive week and some moments of retrospection later; the root cause of my state of non-action seemed to be lack of clarity and focus. Every day this week, I had bunch of ideas related to the on going projects. Somewhere during this cycle of dealing with tasks, I got overwhelmed with the chained “task” reaction, and lost the focus to organize/think through.
Looking back…
I needed to get into the System again, let the System worry about ideas/projects/tasks. And then my goal should as simple as knocking the tasks off, one by one. My previous attempts to hack on a System were only moderately successful (apart from the few months when I hosted Tracks on my domain). Two lessons from the past -
- Go for the most minimalist yet tweakable user interface. You must know where what is
- Carefully choose the system (GTD et. al), or the system would get too complex, and ultimately take me down with it
Made the jump
Remember the Milk, it is. The biggest other online contender was Toodledo with great many features (per this comparison chart). I do care a lot about how and where my data goes (read encrypted), todoist only provides SSL with premium accounts. No go. Plus with RTM, I loved their usability and the amazing community around. If you haven’t done already, check out their Tips and Tricks blog posts. So far so good
Next, choosing a system. I started with Zen To Done (loved the principles), thanks to ssimon for this nice writeup on implementing ZTD with RTM.
Tweak it up
Here are the RTM mods I’m using:
- User style: Remember the Milk – Keyboard Shortcuts (Smart Add)
- User style: RTM on top -chrome (with some modifications, available here)
And this is how the interface looks currently.
