As mentioned in Making Things Work For Me, I came up with a plan for my TODO system. More accurately, I tweaked my current plan and filled in a couple of essential details based on my experience with my existing system. If you’re not familiar with Things, its website really does describe it quite well. What follows is how I describe my plan to myself. Subject to change, and clearly, further detailing.

Routine

  • Capture everything I want to do into this system’s Inbox.
  • Work from Today every day.
  • During the week, either do the tasks scheduled for that day, or reschedule them.
  • During a weekly review every Monday morning, schedule tasks into days of the week
    • This is done by going through all tasks in the system and deciding what to work on, and vaguely when to work on it.
    • Can set a theme for a week or days in it (on Calendar), and use that to determine what tasks to complete, or what project to progress, each day.
    • Do not over-commit
    • To avoid the overhead of context-switching, generally only schedule tasks from one Project per day. If helpful, schedule the whole project for that day, and organize internally.
    • If I miss Monday morning, do it ASAP.
  • Whenever I have a minute, file Inbox tasks and schedule them for the Monday review (earlier if urgent).
  • If I find myself rescheduling a task over and over again, take it out of the scheduling system.
  • Similarly, if I find myself reading an unscheduled task over and over again during weekly review without scheduling it, put it in Someday.
  • Review Someday every year January 1.

Filing rules

  • Areas of Responsibility represent the ongoing, overarching, central concerns of my life that never complete. They are the highest level of organization, and every legitimate task should either fit into one of them or be rejected as out of scope for my life.
  • Projects are meta-tasks which represent a specific long-term goal with a clear definition of completion.
  • By the definition of an AOR, loose tasks are just tasks filed directly under an AOR (or, temporarily, un-filed tasks in the Inbox).
  • If I know ahead of time when particular pieces of a project are due, schedule all of their tasks at once in my weekly review.
  • Tags are used like contexts in GTD: people, places, locations… Simple suggestions for when to care or where to go to complete the task. Very optional.

Integration with external systems

  • Emails get marked with a blue flag and archived when a task is created for them in Things.