Space L Clottey
My Notepad Tasklist System
My current tasklist is a notepad file opened instantly by pressing alt+space.
Benefits
- Speed
- Instant open with alt+space, totally offline and plaintext, no lag because it’s notepad.
- Keep priorities in mind
- Every time I add a task I’m forced to consider whether it applies to my top priorities (currently sleep + exams) no matter how important the task I’m adding seems in the moment. Usually it’s not, so its shunted father down to less essential categories.
- The subheadings force me to consider what’s important.
- It forces me to distinguish between ‘need to do’ and ‘like to do’.
- Indent subtasks
- This reduced procrastination as you can very easily turn vague tasks into tiny concrete tabs by spamming enter then tab
Things I thought I needed but don’t
- Losing the ‘urgent / not urgent’ distinction hasn’t cost me anything.
- Tasklists that organise by value / time, like SuperMemo Tasklist, work best for idea lists where you don’t have to do anything. Not great for actual tasks.
Other Categories Below
- Competence (writing / programming)
- Relatedness (social things / people to contact)
- Postponed
- Months that things are postponed to
- Ideas
- Compete tasks
- for motivation
The AutoHotkey code that lets me use open it this way:
Alt & Space::
run, C:\Users\space\OneDrive\Documents\tasks.txt
return
Though of course you could just stick the file on your start menu or desktop, though you might lose some speed that way.
Run as much of your life out of notepad as possible.