Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?
I&#x27;ve never had a lot of luck with categorizing and allocating either. Which is actually fine, because what category (or, God help us, categorIES) a task fits into is ultimately not a terribly valuable piece of information. It&#x27;s costly to obtain, in terms of time spent categorizing, but yields no particular insights, other than maybe the frustrating realization that a surprising number of tasks fit plausibly into multiple categories. (Which is as it should be, if you&#x27;re productive and your life is reasonably well integrated.)<p>The only question your system needs to answer is what to do NEXT. And the only categories as far as I&#x27;m concerned are &quot;work&quot; and &quot;home.&quot; Keep it simple. Therefore I have a spreadsheet for each. Within each one, here&#x27;s what I have:<p>I have a list of things that repeat every day, called &quot;dailies.&quot; I do those first.<p>Then I have a list of small one-off tasks that can be taken care of relatively quickly. This list is called, inspiringly enough, &quot;uncategorized.&quot;  I do these right after the dailies.<p>&quot;Uncategorized&quot; is also the default landing place for any new task. Sometimes you just want to write something down without thinking about it much. Next time I go through the list, any tasks that need to be moved to another list, I&#x27;ll do it then.<p>Finally there&#x27;s the &quot;projects&quot; list, which consists of bigger tasks with sub-tasks under them, in order, and with deadlines noted, and the whole bit.<p>Using macros, key bindings and event triggers I can re-order all these lists with one keystroke.  Each item has an integer next to it for sorting.  I usually use 0 through 4:<p>0 - waiting for something or someone else<p>1 - doing right now<p>2 - next<p>3 - later<p>4 - tomorrow<p>You&#x27;ll notice that by doing &quot;dailies&quot; and &quot;uncategorized&quot; first, I&#x27;m doiog the opposite of what some advice suggests: I sweat the small stuff first. That&#x27;s because I&#x27;m a night person, so I save the morning hours, when my mind is dull, for small, routine and easy things. By the time I get to my projects list, I&#x27;m fully alert and ready for it.<p>But if you&#x27;re not a night person you could certainly do projects first, then one-offs, then dailies, or something.  Also there&#x27;s nothing stopping me from putting something demanding (that happens to be repetitive) on the &quot;dailies&quot; list for example. Something like studying a new technology for a couple hours a day would go on there. But I would probably tend to postpone it until the evening, i.e. put it in the &quot;dailies&quot; portion of the &quot;home&quot; spreadsheet, and start it when I get home from work. (Or if I&#x27;m working at home, start it when I <i>declare</i> that I&#x27;m home from work.)<p>By the way (back to &quot;projects&quot;), I try like hell to have only one project active at one time.  Unless fucked-with by someone else, I will endeavor to finish each one that I start, before moving on.  There are many reasons why focusing resources on fewer projects sequentially (rather than more projects simultaneously) is the best way to do things.<p>Therefore my day consists of, go to work, get a bunch of small ducks in a row, focus on a project for the mid-morning and afternoon, go home, do daily chores or studying, get small home-ducks in a row (things like &quot;order underwear&quot; or whatnot), and if there&#x27;s time (usually not until the weekend) work on a home-project. I like sleep.<p>Things that recur at intervals other than a day, those go in the calendar, and I get a reminder, every n months or n weeks or whatever.  From there I use automation to transfer it into the &quot;uncategorized&quot; area.  (Home or work, depending on whether it came from my home or work calendar.)<p>If I ever think up a big over-arching life goal, I will make it a project or split it up into projects.  Projects are things that you do.  Goals are things you just think about, that I don&#x27;t really believe in.  Or rather, if it&#x27;s important enough as a goal, I don&#x27;t need to write it down, I just let it influence all my decisions in that direction.  It&#x27;s best not to have too many goals; just a few high-quality ones.  Kind of like how it&#x27;s best to have just a few high-quality friends.  Life is not a shopping expedition; or actually maybe it is, but I say that as someone who thinks the fewer things you &quot;buy&quot; (into), the better.  Also it&#x27;s not good to try to plan out your entire life; give yourself some freedom to steer the ship in real time. Rely a little on your wits and creativity instead of on a script.