My productivity system

I'm writing this because I often get comments from friends and family about how I manage to stay on top of things.

As a child, my parents helped me a lot with keeping track of things. Once I got to high school I struggled with classes, nearly falling out from the honors program my freshman year. The reason was silly in hindsight - I kept forgetting to turn in or do homework assignments.

Since then, I’ve been evolving a simple system to keep that scenario from ever happening again.

The system

First, most types of work can be broken down into two things: tasks and projects. Tasks are simple things you need to do on or by a certain date. Examples would be grocery shopping, wishing someone happy birthday, cleaning, etc.

Tasks also handle capturing new information quickly. I default to creating a task with the bare minimum as early as possible, so that I can follow up and figure out whether the task needs to be moved to a different day, completed, or turned into a project. If someone texts me saying what time they’re free to grab lunch, I immediately write it down as a task. If someone tells me about a cool movie, I write it down as a task for today, with the intention that I’ll look into it later and decide whether I want to watch it.

Projects

Projects are more open ended, take longer, and don't always have a date attached. Examples of projects would be learning graphic design, setting up automatic backup on my laptop, planning a trip to New York, etc. It's key to separate the two - I kept them mixed for a few years, which led to me procrastinating on everything due to perceived difficulty of projects.

Projects should always have a list of items attached to them as the next step. A good default next step is "research to figure out next steps". Separating “planning” from “doing” helps me fight procrastination - any task that mixes both has a higher perceived difficulty.

I also recommend organizing projects into 3 categories - WIP, TODO, and BACKLOG. WIP projects are projects that you are currently working on - it should be bounded (less than 5 for me) to focus your time and energy. TODO is a list of projects you feel you need to do at some point. BACKLOG is a list of projects that you may want to do, or that are very low priority. The reason backlog projects exist (instead of being deleted) is because priorities change, and sometimes a backlog item becomes more urgent, and a TODO project needs to be moved to the backlog.

In practice

I remember trying a bunch of different todo list applications to try and keep my academics straight. RememberTheMilk, Any.do, Todoist, Google Keep, the list goes on and on. I eventually happened upon TickTick (the same company used to publish a frontend to Google Tasks that I used). I’ve used the free version for over 10 years at this point.

Here's a screenshot of what TickTick looks like for me right now. You can see my daily tasks, my project categories, and a few additional things.

I use the Today view for anything that will realistically get done today. This includes both tasks, and anything I've captured through the day. The goal is to make the Today view empty at the end of each day.

Projects are never assigned a date, to prevent them from showing up in the Today view. They exist separately, and I look at the WIP tag to see what I need to be working on. I also track what needs to be done for a project by modifying the description of the entry in TickTick.

I also have a "Dates" list. This is mostly because (free tier) TickTick limits lists to having 100 items, so I made a separate list with birthdays, anniversaries, etc to avoid using up the quota for my main list.

I’ve also tagged a few other types of tasks - wishlist is just a list of things I want to eventually buy (so I never forget to purchase something I needed at the store). Maintenance is anything that I do to maintain my lifestyle - things like dishes, laundry, even getting a haircut. I recommend not going overboard to keep things simple - when I was in college I had a single tag per class I was taking in a semester.

That's it! I’m not the most prolific or productive person by any means but this simple system has been instrumental in making sure I never forget something I need to do, and reducing my urge to procrastinate.