A Year of GTD #
A year ago I started tracking my TODOs much more systematically using the Getting Things Done system in Obsidian. It only clicked for me when I hand rolled my own version on top of Obsidian, using default tools or Notion never felt low effort and easy.
I’ve been relatively consistent with keeping track of my tasks and working on dashboards, but now that a year has finished, I have a much better sense of what works and doesn’t work for me within the system.
- Be ruthless in pruning your dashboard to exactly what you can do in a week (hint: it’s not as much as you think).
- It’s more important for me to track things I don’t want to do but have to (not always, but as a rough heuristic). My default mode is to execute on things I want to do, so I don’t need a dashboard of tasks motivating me here. I’m going to take this a step further in 2024 by really trying to make my dashboard very sparse so I can focus only on the big rocks I’m excited about.
- Have many ways to record and reflect. I have a handwritten journal, random notes I scrawl on project pages and a per day notes section. Variety makes me record more.
- Really try to do some version of a weekly review. Even if you lack the mental energy to clean up the dashboard that week, write down the vibes of the week in your weekly review. The stuff unrecorded in your notes but that lives in your memory is really powerful, and you can’t really remember those when looking back at a week months later.
- Make it easy to add new projects and be liberal with creating them (even if a lot of them are marked “someday”).