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

On hyperlink rabbit holes

Social media just makes me, at best, morose while I just scroll for hours through algorithmic brain bait or, at worst, overwhelmed at the scale of The Suck¹ happening on the daily. But I am more overall healthy and stable today than in previous years and have had better ability to pop myself out of it. Donc, I’ve been on a quest for more old style blogs² in an attempt to find a certain kind of thing… again. Not like a “capture my youth” sort of thing but more finding people in a different media create something more about thinking than just attention.

How I do the thing

I am still a staunch lover of RSS having never gotten over the untimely demise of Google Reader and had been hopping through all the things that have tried to replace it. Right now, I mostly use Reeder 5 to aggregate things which, when I first moved to it³, was powered by Feedly but now I have been using it essentially exclusively. Any time I find something even remotely interesting online that seems to have some sort of regular presence, I grab an RSS feed for it and put it in Reeder.

I have a “Trial” folder. Anything I find myself reading regularly graduates to the “Good Ole Blogs” folder and maybe to the “Morning Breakfast” folder that I read over coffee nearly every day.

How do I choose things?

OR logic between these rules but AND means they have a better chance at success…

1. They have to come from sources I like.
2. They have to be actual people⁴.
3. They need to exist outside of X, preferably Mastodon.
4. They need to write on more than 1 topic⁵

Bonus if they think in footnotes.

Sources.

Today’s bounty of new feeds, and what inspired capturing⁶ this came from a bunch of b logs I sudden found at Bear which has a Discover page to find popular or chronological feeds of blogs hosted on its site⁷. I have read through each unique blog on the list today (Apr 14) adn added nearly all of them. There’s a trove of interesting folks waiting there.

I also mine Mastodon and Bluesky (Maybe Threads a little but that is getting enshittified⁸ pretty quickly….) for people writing in the accessibility and design space, plus the occasional Apple thing. I literally go through tags to see what I can find. Or use the following list of people I already follow to look for things they find interesting. That has also shown a number of really neat things.

So what neat things have you found?

I’m glad you asked. In no particular order, here are blogs and specific posts that got me to add these people to Reeder

• Posthuman.blog⁹, specifically this post about Reddit bots that broke my brain: https://posthuman.blog/this-reddit-post-fried-my-brain/
• Megan’s writings, specifically this post about what to share on line. Which.. same. I’m leaning into the “Fuck It, let’s go” mentality: https://magmacranes.bearblog.dev/i-dont-know-how-vulnerable-to-be-online/
• Chuck Wendig, with this post that a resonate with so strongly I’m annoyed I didn’t write it: https://terribleminds.com/ramble/2025/04/09/what-it-feels-like-right-now/
• Waldo Jaquith, on working in the open. Because I also think out loud to.. uh.. inconsistent effect: https://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2025/03/work-open/
• ě because I so viscerally dislike the idea of one big text file per year but absolutely adore how she writes about it and her processes: https://ellanew.com/2025-04-14-obtf-start-here
• Hi, this is Ava with this posit on writing while bored. But also the random poetry app is pretty neat: https://blog.avas.space/damn-phone/

The internet isn’t entirely dead. You can still find some good stuff out there if you Go rabbit chasing.

Footnotes

Landing pages

I keep forgetting that angrybunnyman.com no longer has anything on it. I used to host all my stuff when I was doing more business-y things on Square Space which included landing pages for as many domains as you wanted. So I took advantage since I was paying anyway. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find captures of them in the wayback machine. Seems as if Square Space may block archiving?

Whatever. The point? I’m making another because I am apparently going to sit on that domain forever. It was the name I chose at 14 and, at this point, it just does not feel right to chuck it…

Angrybunnyman dot com in the year of or lort 2025

It’s not live yet because I have to wait for DNS routing to do its thing but this is probably what it’ll look like.

ETA: Got one to load!