Ideas for blog posts were another thing that I used to store in Things, which didn’t really work out all that well. I can also add notes and ratings when I’ve actually read or watched them, which are also reportable/sortable. Rather than facing a huge list of items to get through like when they were chucked into Things, I can now dive in to the specific database and find exactly what I want when I have some spare time. The beauty of this is that I can organise them in a much deeper way with Notion, assigning tags, related URLs, authors, etc – and then sort/display them on that basis. Instead, I created different databases in Notion to gather and organise this stuff.įor example, here is my list of films to watch…Īn excerpt from my Reading List (don’t judge)…Īnd my trimmed down YouTube list (filtering out the Japanese learning videos, as there’s so many of them). Things to Read, Watch, and Listen toĪs I mentioned, my Things ‘Anytime’ lists were filled with different articles I wanted to read, or videos I wanted to watch at some point, and it simply wasn’t working. This not only allows me to more easily track and report on my progress – but also frees up my To Do list in Things for one-off, immediate tasks that need to be completed on a specific day.

Each week I create a new table, and adjust the habits I want to focus on as appropriate.

There are various different kinds of habit tracker templates available, and I customised one that I found online (I can’t remember where now, sorry!). Realising this was liberating, as I could approach the issue differently – with a Habit Tracker. What I thought of as daily tasks are actually habits, rather than ‘to do’ items. What I realised was… neither recurring tasks or lists of videos to watch, articles to read, or music to listen to are actually To Do list items at all, but something quite different. It felt like a pointless exercise, and didn’t provide any of the satisfaction that I should feel upon completing a task. I would tick off the checkbox, only to… immediately re-create it for the next day. The problem with this was that most of my To Do list never really changed.

Recurring tasks never ‘completed’: Lots of the things I want to do are daily tasks, such as practicing Japanese, or making music.

Even using tags, it was becoming a strange source of low-level anxiety, as I knew I would never get round to doing anything there. Piles of articles to read, videos to watch, and miscellaneous tasks.

Too many tasks, not enough organisation: Similar to what I had experienced with Evernote, while I was quick to dump all sorts of things I wanted to do into Things, it seemed like the ‘Someday’ and ‘Anytime’ pile were growing and growing into a huge, unmanageable mass.

However, there were a couple of issues that I had begun to run into which were becoming counter-productive: When it comes to organising and tracking daily tasks, Things is still my go-to. I’ve written before about how much I love Things, and that hasn’t changed.

Recurring tasks in evernote