7 ways of keeping track of your Todos
You may be someone who gets things done as they come, but at some point, almost anybody ends up freeing their mind from the grocery list by writing it down. After all, our working memory can’t barely hold more than 7 to 10 items at once, and unless you’ve got super powers, you’re not going to remember all short-lived things to do, especially if they are recurring.
Over the years, I have experimented with simple techniques to track my Todos. Choosing a tool is deciding on a trade-off between friction, for viewing and addings items, and richness of the status information. Those needs vary greatly depending on the context.
So, while my engineer’s mind would love to apply a single elegant solution to all cases, I must admit I regularly use up to… 7 different systems (!). Here’s a tour, from simplest to most complex use case!
1. At home: pen & paper
When I’m at home and need to complete weekend chores in the apartment, I just write them down on a sheet of paper, with a dash (-) in front of each.
Now, the dash can be overwritten when the status of task evolves:
- Task has been started, but is on hold: double the dash, it becomes a =
- Task done: cross the dash vertically, it becomes a +
- Task is canceled: double-cross to the dash with an X.
I can carry the paper with me or leave it anywhere visible. Looking at it is basically instantaneous and “free” in terms of mind workload. Adding or editing is very quick too.
The drawback, though, is when I start to feel an urge to schedule those tasks in time. “I should book a medical appointment early in the morning, and I must start baking a cake immediately after I get back from the grocery store”. I tend to write them as they would appear on a calendar, but then, if I need to change the schedule, it gets ugly. Anyway, these items usually won’t matter for more than a few days, so I can live with it.
Alternatives: if your house is small enough or you don’t need to carry your list to multiple rooms, a whiteboard or whiteboard does the trick.
2. Working on the computer: the digital notepad
Another relatively low-tech habit I have is to write down short-term todos in a simple Notepad application, using the same conventions (dash, plus, etc.) as for my pen & paper habit.
If I get an idea of something to do, it’s very quick to Alt+Tab to the open Notepad and write it down. And the benefit versus the paper technique is that it’s easy to reorder items.
But of course, the app is only visible on the computer, so I keep that only for tasks in the context of office work.
Usually, I review the next items in the document, and if a task requires significant time, let’s say a 2-hour block of time, I schedule it in my calendar.
Alternatives: there are plenty of free text editors, from the simplest to the most exensible (such as Notepad++ or Visual Studio Code). One of the first freeware I developed was such an app extending Notepad’s capabilities!
3. Documenting your progress in freeform
For some of my long-running software projects, I have the habit to document them using OneNote. I write what I do and how I do it, in order to remember that later. You can view it like a journal or blog in the traditional sense, but it doesn’t need to have complex sentences. Bullet points do the job.
While I document what I’ve done, it feels natural to mention missing work I want to do later. Usually, I write those items in bold, so that I can “unbold” them when they are done.
OneNote supports checkboxes, so that would be an option, but I tend to keep those for recurring checklists.
Alternatives: EverNote, Outline
4. Recurring checklists: getting ready
Checkboxes offer by proper Todolist apps, such as Google Keep, can be useful in those cases:
- Groceries list
- Equipment list for when I’m going on a hike
- Baggage list for when I’m going on a trip
The power of such an app is that it remembers your list forever, so, once you start a new trip, you can just reset the checkboxes and start ticking again. So, the use case here is about handling checklists of things I don’t want to forget for recurring tasks.
And of course, being able to tick them on the go (eg. at the supermarket) is a must have.
Alternatives: in OneNote, in order to reset all checkboxes in one pass, install Gem for OneNote. However, it seems neither Evernote, Microsoft To Do, Todoist nor Tick Tick have this bulk reset feature.
5. Conditional checklists: the kanban board
Now, let’s say you’re packing up for vacation. You’ve already entered the list of common items to pack in Google Keep prior to this trip, so you untick them all and start ticking.
But this time, it’s summer vacation, and your ski gear will be useless. So you’re ticking them as done, even though you are leaving them home.
This works quite well, until there are items for which you change your mind. Let’s say you didn’t take a towel, since you plan on going to a Airbnb room providing one. On the last day, the host cancels and you have to book another one that requires you to bring your own towel. The towel item is ticked, but can you remember whether you discarded it or if you took it in case you were going to swim in the river? Memorizing this could have saved a last-minute unpacking of your heavy suitcase to search for this specific item! And what about packing your suitcase back on the return trip: how do you remember what you took?
Once you’ve ticked items, you can easily forget whether you have packed them or if you left them away. That’s why, you could use a multiple-list (kanban) board using post-it notes, or, better, an online tool such as Trello, available on the web or as a mobile app.
Whenever you start a new trip, click Move All Cards in this List for both Packed and Discarded items, to repopulate Items to Pack.
Alternatives: mutiple clones of Trello are available.
6. Managing your project using TredoList
Let’s talk of more ambitious endeavors. Be it the full organisation of a trip, some side-projects involving software development or creative works, or your yearly bucket list of goals.
For these, I’m using Trello, with a twist. Trello is built around the kanban model in which the status of tasks, such as Todo / Doing / Done, is represented by lists, from which you move items from left to right. For complex projects, I have never been satisfied with it, because I need another dimension for some categories, such as:
- Design work / Main Coding / Polishing / Marketing
- This week / This month / Next month / Later..
- Day 1 of trip / Day 2 / Day 3 etc.
Fortunately, Trello supports Checklists within Cards, and it tracks the completion of those on the card front, which I use as a “done” status. Even better: in order to visually get a quick look at the overall status, I developed an open-source browser extension called TredoList (currently available for Chrome and Firefox) that changes the color of the card automatically based on those checklists. So you can use Trello’s lists for your categories.
It fully supports statuses such as Cancelled (using red), Waiting For someone to do something (orange) and Not Current (transparent), plus an urgent state (bold) based on Trello’s due dates.
Note: Trello recently added a new feature allowing you to colorize the front of your cards. It will replace TredoList’s colors only if you choose such a cover, as you would expect.
Alternatives: Microsoft Planner, part of Office 365, is conceptually similar to Trello, unfortunately the UI feels like bloat and can’t be customized easily. Also, at work I haven’t found how to create a private board, it only allows me to create one in my corporate Teams spaces.
7. Your company-wide project tracking tool
While I use TredoList for my personal software development projects, in my professional game development job I don’t have the option but to use the corporate-mandated tool. Jira is the legacy tool my project has chosen to manage the thousands of tasks of hundreds of people. Beware: while Jira has always been perfectly fit to keep track of bug reports, you may find it incredibly heavy to use to manage tasks.
Its strength is that it’s highly customizable by producers and managers. In other words, the user experience will be as good as the tooling you build yourself on top of it. If you need a quick way to create tasks using the default web interface, you could be disappointed: you need to navigate in forms with dozens of fields, and you will most probably forget half of your new task idea before your finish. Fortunately, many plug-ins are available in a marketplace. For instance, Smart Checklists lets you add your todos within a Jira issue. So if your are working on a long task, just keep the issue page open and tick your checklist as you complete small pieces of work.
The default web UX also fails to offer decent snappiness. It surely was invented before reactive Single-Page Applications existed. As a result, when you click the field of a filter, don’t be too quick to type… or your keystrokes will be registered by the main window before the filter control gets the focus… which triggers dangerous hotkeys (fortunately you can disable them in the settings)! For example, we sometimes have issues mysteriously reassigned to other people, or new issues magically created… just because a user has been typing too fast!
Also in the realm of badly designed UX: if you have the habit to keep a tab open on a specific page, you will occasionally loose your way, due to an unexpected redirection. For instance, it could occur after your session expires or if you modify a filter (that you thought was a copy, but was not).
I could also rant about the depressingly slow bulk change feature (performing one database update at a time, obviously). And since the bulk number remains limited to an arbitrary amount, you need to perform the cumbersome multiple page process several times!
Finally, the limited visualizations of your task list makes it quite difficult to take a step back and evaluate the real workload of a team, let alone build a roadmap. You should try some add-ons that try to fill that hole.
To sum up, I would suggest to have a dev team build custom tools for your most common use cases, based on the Jira API.
Alternatives: there is a neverending list of project management solutions, which I haven’t evaluated, such as Monday.com and Asana. If you made a successful transition from Jira to another platform for a large projects, please comment and tell the world about your experience!
8. Bonus one: Todos in your source code
Are you a software developer? Then you probaby work in iterations, and you’ve surely encountered occasions when you need to write a Todo note within your code for your future self or for coworkers. Once your codebase get large, you could lose track of them. Babylon Engineering has tips to manage Todos in your codebase.
Conclusion
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to handle your todolist, if you want the optimal balance between simplicity and features depending on your context.
Do you handle your tasks in a very different way from these? Please comment and reveal your productivity secrets!
