Erlend Hamberg

For personal projects and goals I keep a couple of index cards aside - one I used for GTD - 2 columns on one side (Next Action and Inbox/New Items) , 3 on the other (Waiting For, Projects, Someday). And then another index card or two for notes and sketches. I find it good to limit them (and keep just three folded in half in a back pocket) , otherwise I end up dragging around a stack of cards and not using them. If I limit them but replace as needed, I seem to use them more and keep them to hand.

I redo my GTD card weekly and drop stuff off every time that I 'thought' I wanted to do but just the act of writing it down and reviewing shows me it is not a priority. For a while I kept my old cards, but now I ditch them.

GTD = Getting Things Done - https://hamberg.no/gtd/

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I use a combination of a mental/back of index card kanban board for purchasing goals (a cadence of what I can afford to save/spend, leading me along a list of prioritised items I want <or don't want by the time I can buy them in cash usually>) - been thinking about making an app for it for a while, but beyond my skills.

Right now I have two or three 'main' hobbies - paddle boarding, brewing beer and cycling. While I have a good salary, we have 2 kids and a single income, so things I would have just bought without thinking just a few years ago, now get thought about for a good while before pulling the trigger. If anything I'm happier this way. I stops me buying 'hobby crap' that I never use, and gives me…

What I really need is an location aware task list, that allows me to easily setup recurring or one-off tasks and reminds me to do it whenever I'm at a location where they make sense. Basically, the "Getting Things done" methodology by David Alen, but updated for the event-driven 21st century man. Here is a simplified version: https://hamberg.no/gtd

For example, if I setup a task that I need to purchase a road toll sticker every year and that can only be acquired at a gas station, the app should track when the current sticker expires and prompt me when I am at a gas station. At the store, I get a notification with all missing gorceries that I've earlier identified back home and inserted in the "Groceries" task list. When I come back home, the app will prompt me to, for example, read the gas meter that is due that day.

I'm currently using Google Tasks for these tasks but it's less than optimal, although the gmail integration is pretty cool. Your Recall app could make up the Archival module of a great tasklist; i.e, if items come up that seem important and I might later need them (such as, say, a particularly interesting hackernews thread or news item), I need a fast and easy way to archive them with as much context and metadata, so I can easily reference them later. Such items could have optional reminders, so I can snooze them and they keep popping up.

The answers could range from "I blog about things I learn" (indicating a small amount of notes) all the way up to "I use GTD[0]" (indicating an endless amount of constantly updated and reviewed notes), but none of the suggestions are going to help you.

You need to try different things and see what works for you and what doesn't. Your personal preference could be even customized to the situation, so you might want to use GTD for work and some other system for your personal life.

So how I did it is tried one option (blogging about everything), then tweaked it (blogging about something), then tweaked it again (leaning towards messy notes, away from blog drafts), then tweaked it again (Markdown brain dumb of all the things that I think I might need in a day/week/month/year), and again (some of the notes about a random topic get detailed enough to write a blog post about it).

And the reason I've mentioned blogging so much is that, when trying to tell a story about the topic, I often find some previously unnoticed gaps in my knowledge. So that's kind of "reading notes, re-writing notes in such a way that I'm telling a story" style that currently works for me the best. YMMV

0 - https://hamberg.no/gtd/

I'm a fan of Org Mode with Emacs [0] and using the app BeOrg [1] on my iPhone.

I have 3 main task files:

- todo.org for things I need to do

- backlog.org for things that I don't have to do now but should do in the future

- inbox.org for any random ideas or notes

The concept of an Inbox was taken straight from Getting Things Done [2].

I have different searches set up in BeOrg so that it is easy to view tasks from each different file.

This is definitely more complicated than a single file, but I like it mainly because it keeps my main task file (todo.org) organized. I also don't go through organizing my files that much either.

inbox.org is just a great place to dump anything, so I usually do a quick scan and either delete everything or refine it to the backlog.org.

For backlog.org, I'll usually just let things sit there and build up. After a while I'll realize that if something has been there for a long time, it probably isn't worth doing - or I already did it, so I delete it.

[0]: https://orgmode.org/

[1]: https://www.beorgapp.com/

[2]: https://hamberg.no/gtd

On iOS, there's a shortcuts app that enables you to automate things.

I have a shortcut for the following:

Receive Any input from Share Sheet, Quick Actions
If there's no input Ask For Text
|
Append Shortcut input to Documents/inbox.txt (make new line)

Every morning I sort lines from my inbox file into todo.txt, ideas.txt, calendar, etc. It's pretty much a modified version of GTD:

[1] https://hamberg.no/gtd

I have one idea per line in my ideas.txt file, so I use the following to pick some random ideas:

cat ideas.txt | shuf | head -n 20

Reviewing old ideas is all about cross-pollination. With fresh eyes, I'll sometimes append a small insight to the line, or delete ideas that have lost their magic.

When ideas get too large to fit on a single line, I break them out into unpublished essays. And if I work on them long enough, eventually I publish them :)

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Whoa, what a coincidence! I just checked my ideas file, and I'm exactly at 3333 lines.

cat ideas.txt | wc -l
3333

I do something to similar, although using a mobile app (Google Keep), and write down EVERYTHING. For me, probably the biggest benefit of doing so was freeing my brain. I no longer have to worry about naturally remembering things, and it makes my life a lot less stressful. It also provides me more time and brain power to think about what actually matters to me.

Nowdays, if a thought pops in my head while I'm laying down in bed, I'll just get up for a second and write it down. Feels so good.

This article https://hamberg.no/gtd/ articulates the idea pretty well:

> When your system and your trust in your system is in place, your subconsciousness will stop keeping track of all the things you need to do and stop constantly reminding you. This reduces stress and frees up precious brain time to more productive thinking—maybe it even saves real time so that you have more time for ballet lessons, painting classes, and roller-blading.