Blowing up my task manager

IDK about you but when I feel entirely lost when trying go figure out what to do, I ignore it until something else comes up and shakes a bunch of cogs loose.

That’s only mostly true. I’d been feeling off at work the last few weeks. There’s a few things going on, not the least of which is that I’ve got a number of folks that have really stepped up and taking over some big swaths of my responsibilities after being backups for a long while, but the most recent that sort of jolted me out of the vague something is off-ness of all of it was taking a new¹ role. It’s been just over a week but I’ve gotten 3 new projects and my productivity system fell apart². I found myself stressed to remember the new things which is 100% a sign that I’ve lost trust in my system.

So what ya doin’, buddy?

Trying to remember everything you need to do does not a good system make. I’ve been a good GTD³ monkey for years so I’m familiar how you set and execute the tooling to be productive. Task execution is like the fun part, right? You do the interesting things. Check list items up. Dopamine.

But. I’ve been alternately great and terrible at what is probably the most important piece of the system - the review. I don’t think I’ve done a solid review in months and adding a bunch of new projects really highlight how lost in the weeds I’d gotten. Anything I needed to replace it with was going to need to make reviews easier and better integrate with my calendar. And bonus maybe use tagging well enough that I can filter my task views for certain situations. Like a smart list that shows me tasks I wanted to do at home over the week that didn’t necessarily require me to do task review on Saturdays….

Then: I blew everything up.

Steps to destruction

So first, I made a Shortcut⁴ that swept through all my tasks and pull out the list it was on and the title and dropped it into a note in Apple Notes. I then deleted literally everything I had in Reminders. All of it.

I had about 2 dozen project lists and 195 tasks. About 20 of those were template tasks so were’t “active” and a bunch were on a someday list. But that’s still a lot. 195 tasks is too many tasks for a reasonable adult to actually get anything done. So that was probably a good part, right? Task bloat.

Second I created 3 shell lists. 1 for life and 1 for both of my major areas of ownership at work (Accessibility, Info Security). My goal was to NOT⁵ add more lists and instead use the Reminders Kanban-style project lists so I can more fully see all the active projects. My thought was going through as few lists as possible even with a lot of projects would make reviewing and selecting tasks for the day far easier.

Third, I went through every single task I exported to Notes. Stuff that didn’t matter: deleted. Stuff that I still wanted but would do later: someday project in the correct list. Actual stuff that needs active work: add to/create a board for the project in the correct list. Eventually, the note was lank⁶

Fourth, I did another review of everything after I got it out of the note.

What it looks like now

I ended up adding a few other lists -one for meetings because I have enough that I own that need a place to capture topics and easily find them. I’d not been able to get tags to handle those.

I’m down to about 100 tasks across an inch of active projects. Definitely too many projects still but now I actually know how many I’ve committed to?

Conclusion

Do your reviews. Weekly reviews keep things tidy and having o do this mass purge and review is a bad situation. It took about 3 hours to get through everything. But my review today was only about 15 minutes.

Footnotes