jmtd → log → calendar

As part of refreshing my approach to things, I'd been re-reading "getting things done", a book I first read in around 2004.

Since I first read it I've got quite good at some of the front-end suggestions: gathering up TODO items, organising them by context ("stuff I can do at home", "stuff I can only do in Newcastle", etc), and thinking in terms of "next action". However, I can still find that lots of TODO items languish for a while.

I eventually hit on the idea of using a Kanban board - in my case Trello - as a personal system for assigning some tasks to days. I have 1 column per weekday plus a "backlog" column. The top task on each weekday is a coloured/themed card to indicate where I will be working (Home or Town). There are a couple of other cards that live permanently in their columns, with a unicode "pin" in the task name (e.g. "decide on next week's town/home days").

Other than that, I have a smattering of TODO items, one per card, that I assign to days of the week. If a particular day gets a lot of cards on it, it becomes clear I've probably picked too much stuff to try and do on that day. I move cards from days and clear the week's task cards to Backlog at the end of Friday.

This seems to work for me. I feel like I'm getting more things off my lists and fewer TODOs are languishing indefinitely. I'm effectively I'm using Trello like a Calendar.

What was interesting to me on re-reading GTD is that Allen advises against doing exactly this. He argues that the Calendar should accurately represent the "hard" edges of your work commitments. I think he is somewhat optimised towards people who have a lot more real appointments and hard deadlines in their day-to-day calendars than I have.

I'd like to get off Trello, if possible. It's not ideal. the app has some offline support but it's not perfect so sometimes, when I'm away from the Internet, I am am prevented from accessing or updating my plan; Sometimes the App and/or website are unavailable; occasionally I need to do the login dance again which is time consuming and distracting from whatever I opened the App to achieve. On the other hand, it is very finely-tuned to be a pleasure to use with a simple and attractive UI and some reasonable keyboard shortcuts for speedily filing things.

Trello is not the "top copy" of any of my TODO items either, so I've duplicated (a subset of) them into Trello, and so there's the mental or time cost of managing that duplication.

I've looked at NextCloud Deck, but it's too bare bones (or at least was when I looked at it), lacking the ability to colour or theme cards at all. There is a Microsoft Planner, and I have a fully-fledged Microsoft Office 365 account via the University, so that's an option. There are many other such apps.

I did wonder whether, since I was using it as a Calendar anyway, I could use a Calendar app for the purpose. I use Google Calendar (on web/desktop) for work, and increasingly for home; I access it via iOS Calendar on phone (not the Google Calendar App). The UI flow for iOS Calendar, at least, is totally unsuited to mimic what I am doing with Trello.

The Google Calendar Web UI is also too cluttered to realistically do this either.

This lead me to look at a few other Calendar apps.