3/
Game:
1. Make a list of the 6 important tasks 
and move a paperclip if you complete task 
2. Move all 6, you save the baby!
3. Complete only a few items? Then at the end of day roll a dice (real or dice app)
4. Number lands on completed task you saved the baby!
5. Uncompleted task? 
Try again next day.
My fam now asks me when I finish work, “Did you save the baby today?”
It’s given me some motivation and fun on some of the mundane tasks.
Have fun with it!
2/
My wife and her BFF started pranking me and her hubby by placing these creepy little babies in our pockets or shoes. Apparently it’s from an Amazon review tormenting husbands. 
So naturally I have them everywhere! I decided to incorporate into this game. Feel free to use any trinket or token.
Here’s a #GTD #officegame I just made recently.
“Dice Baby”
Took the idea from the Masterclass by James Clear, author of Atomic Habits.
I aim to complete 6 worthy tasks everyday at work. And have 6 paperclips I move over from one area of my desk (left monitor stand) over to completed area (right monitor stand).
The idea was from a salesman that used two cups and paper clips to make and track sales calls for the day.
#introduction I'm a generalist gladly busy with a bit of everything, with in mind, hands and heart: #autonomy and #community building.
Here to #escalate.
I work with #food transformation, #plants and #fermentation, and I love #brewing beer and #cooking for a lot of people. Sometimes I share workshops and teachings.
Part of @genopretkbh for 7 years +, supporting sustainability in communities and friendships through #conflict #systems and mediation.
Background in #somatics, #dance, #art #music and #theater. Even as an Awareness person in #techno raves.
I've also been a #massage therapist and #sound healer for some years, and am sharing now community oriented ear #acupuncture treatments with @aabnenaale
I am practicing #plant and #vegetable breeding, #seeds collecting and exchanging with #GoingToSeed. I grow in zone 8.
I like to #fast, #hike, and gather friends around it.
I like #systems and #routines. Convinced fellow and fan of #GTD.
Staring at a #fire is a good medicine. Sustaining the one in my heart and my comrades also. #internationalism makes me melt.
I like weird shit and embracing my inner #weirdo
@kushal I use the #GettingThingsDone #GTD methodology. In fact, this year will mark the 20th anniversary of me being on GTD, and I'll never use any other system again.
http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=4283
Text description:
T-Rex burst onto the scene, saying: “Shocking news, everyone: I just got a letter… …from myself. It’s a version of myself that’s trapped in the past!! And this letter contains a very precise list of things that I need to do, as soon as possible, to change our future!”
Dromiceiomimus said: “Holy smokes!!”
T-Rex continued: “I know! I’m freaking out!”
Utahraptor then slowed that roll with a “Hold on. Wait just a minute here.”
T-Rex said: “…Yes”
Utahraptor went on: “It’s just—all letters are sent by someone living in the past to someone living in their future, so that’s actually super normal. Was this letter mailed, T-Rex?”
T-Rex replied: “No, it was delivered by hand! Left for me in a place only my past and/or future self would know I’d find it!”
Utahraptor asked: “You made a to-do list and left it on your counter, didn’t you?”
T-Rex then said: “Utahraptor! Life is as interesting as you make it, bud!”
Fast schon wieder Schlafenszeit. Ein paar Themen habe ich noch für das Wochenende.
Heute noch: Ein zu meiner Notizsammlung und Selbstorganisation. #gtd #zettelkasten
Wrote a blog post about capturing #Slack messages directly into my #Emacs #Orgmode #GTD inbox:
https://srijan.ch/capturing-slack-messages-directly-into-emacs-orgmode-inbox
I am in the process of setting up a brand new laptop and doing a lot of thinking about organizing information and files and time. This was a good read. I am looking forward to learning more about #GTD but I would love to learn more about Cory's strategies for info management @pluralistic.
@pluralistic in addition to #GTD methods, I found a pretty "revealing" method that helps me prioritize things:
- Things I want to do
- Things I need to do
- Things others want me to do
#emacs Succinct, clear write-up on #gtd via #orgmode from @me: https://jlamothe.net/blog/2024-11-15/ I have the same attention problems & use it in much the same way (to not drop things on the floor)
when you're on your sixth #productivity system deep-dive (finally getting into #GTD...) and the book you're reading quotes Alfred North #Whitehead, whose work on #time was a touchstone of your #philosophy dissertation earlier this year:
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."
APPARENTLY there is nothing Alfred North Whitehead wasn't basically right about (despite the reputation to the contrary)
“Daily habits are superpowers. Once something is a habit, you get it for free.”
Love this line (and the rest of the post) from @pluralistic
It’s reinvigorated my commitment to #gtd and daily #discipline so that I can live the life I want, not simply the one presented to me.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one-weird-trick/
Teaching my first-year seminar this morning, the topic was "time management." I'm showing them a simplified, un-branded (but cited) version of GTD.
We walked through the collect, process, organize steps using the items they wrote down in class.
No better way to demonstrate these practices than with Emacs and Org mode up on the screen! What makes Org good for GTD makes it good for teaching GTD: it's just an outline of text, with no fussyness to get in the way.
A #GT3 Mustang in the #IMSA #GTD class, as taken by a manual focus catadioptric (mirror) lens. Tokina SZX 400mm on a #Nikon D810 @ 1/50th f/8 ISO 160. #IndianapolisMotorSpeedway
@sacha thanks for the great insight!
As long as it gets the job done and you're happy with the workflow, that's perfectly fine.
My workflows are no clean implementation of any particular method either. I took parts that worked for me from this method, other parts from that method, developed some parts myself. For anybody who is able to do that kind of workflow development over time, that's perfect from my perspective!
I feel like my inner self is slowly descending into chaos and I need something to structure my notes and things I have to do, and in my work keep an overview of what my team is doing (being the team lead). In the past I used #gtd for personal #productivity. Anything better nowadays out there?
How about organization of notes? I know about #zettelkasten but that isn’t my things. And reorganizing according to Johnny Decimal is tons of work and I am not sure yet if it is worth it.
Came up with and tried a three phase pomodoro technique yesterday for working thru tasks and projects.
This three phase pomodoro cycle repeats and resyncs hourly. The three phases I came up with:
* physical tidying/cleaning
* physical processing
* digital processing
This worked quite well and I got a lot of things done, tasks completed or significantly advanced in ~6 hours.
Many of these were “annoying” or “boring” but often not immediately “necessary” tasks that I had left undone (procrastinated) for many weeks, especially with all the travel I have had in the past two months nevermind first two-thirds of this year.
I took the basic idea of a pomodoro 20-minute timebox¹, figured three of those fit into an hour, and picked three things that were cognitively different enough that switching from one to the other would use different cognitive skills (perhaps different parts of my brain), thus allowing a form of cognitive rest (rather than fatigue, and giving one part of my brain a chance to rest, while using others).
This eliminated the need to take “pomodoro breaks”, whether 5 minutes or 20-30 minutes and it felt nearly effortless (actually fun at times) to cycle through the three phases, repeatedly, for hours on end. Before I knew it six hours had gone by and many tasks had been completed.
The three 20 minute phases have the advantage of quickly determining at any time which phase you should be in by checking your watch/phone for :00-:20, :20-:40, :40-:00. If you happened to be “out of phase”, e.g. “run over” because you were finishing something up, rather than stressing about it, switch to the in-progress phase and pick-up a new task accordingly.
A 20 minute timebox also has the advantage that tasks are less annoying or boring when you know that in less than 20 minutes you will be able to set them down and switch to something else.
There was an iterative sense of expectation of novelty. The expectation of even only a little novelty was enough to make things go more quickly in the present, and even provide a game-like encouragement of see how far I can get with this boring or annoying task in the little time remaining. Could I even complete this one task in less than 20 minutes?
I think repeating three phase pomodoro cycles worked particularly well on a Saturday afternoon when I had very few external interrupts. I think that was key. It gave a sense of momentum, if actual flow², that itself felt like it gave me a source of energy to keep going. I’m not sure it would work during normal work hours in any highly or even partially collaborative environment.
Interruptions for physical needs, moving around, drinking, eating etc. were something that I allowed at any time, and that removed any stress about those too.
I rarely set any count-down timers. A few times when I recognized I was starting or picking up a task that I might get absolutely lost in (such as many digital processing tasks like email), I set an explicit count-down timer for the end of the phase. These timer alarms certainly helped to give me permission to put down that task (for now) and switch, rather than feeling compelled to “complete” it which I know from experience can often take much longer, and leave me feeling more tired, perhaps even too tired to do anything else.
There was also a sense of relief in knowing that even if I didn’t finish a particular task by the end of a phase, I would have the opportunity to pick it right back up in 40 minutes. Or maybe by then I would have decided to work on a different task in that phase.
This three phase pomodoro technique worked well for tasks that are not very cognitively engaging (hence boring or annoying). Such tasks have low context, and thus low context-switching costs, but still benefit from taking mental breaks and resets.
In contrast, any deeply cognitively engaging, thinking, or creative tasks, like inventing, coding, writing, typically have a much higher context-switching costs, and in my experience work better when you can set aside a longer block of time to allow yourself build up all the context and then joyfully explore the depths of whatever it is you’re creating.
That being said, I think some creative tasks (depending on the person) could benefit from time-boxing. Like having a constraint to write a short blog post in the morning before a workout or breakfast. Worth trying such one-off timeboxes or even formal pomodoros and seeing if they help complete some creative tasks faster (or more often) over time.
#productivity #pomodoro #pomodoroTechnique #gtd #gettingThingsDone #Saturday
References:
¹ Apparently I misremembered 20 minutes instead of the typical pomodoro 25 minutes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
GTD Two-minute rule 
If you can finish a task in under two minutes, do it now.
This method, from Getting Things Done, helps you avoid letting small tasks accumulate into piles.
Achieving small victories helps maintain your motivation! #TwoMinuteRule #GTD #TfT 
Experimenting with simply not picking up my phone at any point during my morning routine. Not offline, just not phone-centric. So far, a week in, my ability to Be Present and Get Things Done (mostly by means of being less interrupted by the *habit* of the phone) is much improved.
