I was reading every tool is a hammer by Adam Savage and he also has a variant of short term and long term task lists. He essentially keeps a mega checklist for each project which can have infinite resolution and be as fine-grained as he needs it to be. Then for his daily lists, he pulls in tasks from various mega-lists. I thought it was a neat approach and it’s been fun to adopt it.
That’s a really interesting way to solve the problem, and I would like to try it. Do you happen to know if he mentioned any software that operates in that way? I’m imagining many lists, with a nearly frictionless way to say ‘do this today’, and the task moves accordingly.
I’ve tried a handful of note taking apps with checklists, and actual checklist apps over the years. The one thing they’ve all had in common is that they’re too cumbersome to really integrate into my daily habits. I need something that lets me add and adjust super quick to accelerate the actual task getting done.
The issue with this is that you have to pre-schedule tasks across all lists, which means you need to go through all the lists to schedule every item - often each day.
The better way to do it is to set priorities on TODO header items in org-mode. This is far from perfect through because you're still manually setting priorities across all projects - which is very flawed.
Adam mentions in the book that his solution is fully analog. He has notebooks with project lists and daily lists and he manually re-writes tasks when he wants to copy them over.
For myself, I think that’s too cumbersome so I use vimwiki. A sibling comment mentioned org mode and I think that would be an excellent tool to implement this and imo, work better than vimwiki.
