I used to overcomplicate my todo system.

My todos were scattered across workflowy, email, various plain text files, a weekly planner, my white boards, and Dropbox. This doesn’t include the post it notes covering my desk, reminding me to check whichever planner, and notes to self on various topics. I would then write down my immediate todos (4 items) on a post-it-note to begin working, I would inevitably lose that post it and write another one with the same content.

My weekly planner is located on my tablet, and I would keep this open always. I’ve since begun using my tablet for project design and documentation*, and can no longer keep my todos continuously visible (which led to the aforementioned mess).

I find it is useful to have my todos to be immediately visible, this frees up my mental cache to focus on brainstorming by eliminating the need to actively keep in mind the mundanities of everyday life. Thus, without structure to organize them spatially, post it notes grew colonies and conquered my desk.

Finally, I realized that considering self-betterment an ongoing project is a productive perspective. It allows for more focus, and less guilt maintaining your physical and mental health when you could be working on a project.

With this mental freedom, I sat down and unified my todo system. I’ve finally settled upon a simple routine that works wonderfully for me.

The board is broken up into (annotated below) 0. Self improvement & documentation 1. Development of math & physics intuition 2. Low priority 3. Today (indexed 0,1,2,3 by order of planned completion — indexes adjusted throughout day) 4. Done

If I’m not at home, I email myself todos to add to the board.

*I maintain a writeup for each one of my active projects (linked to relevant files in Dropbox) in One Note. These writeups include an “in progress” tab for detailed, longer term, project specific goals.

Todos requiring temporal synchrony with another party are listed on Google Calendar (i.e., calls to professors, doctor’s appointments)