todo.txt Tuning Tips [experiments in effectiveness]

Tomorrow is my 20th day living my life in ASCII and I still love it. Here are some tips that are really doing the trick for me. For the first time in a long time. I am consistently seeing and working my lists. Go ASCII!

  1. Keep your lists where you can see ‘em. Visibility is crucial. If I see it, I’ll do it. When working, the first thing I do is get a terminal up and size it to the width of the monitor and enough height to see about 10 lines of text. That’s plenty to keep my “hotlist” in view. Read bullet 5 for a description the “hotlist”. Click here for an example.
  2. Use cron to keep your future next actions and ticklers off your radar. The todo.txt system uses a recur.txt and associated todo_cron.sh script to insert next actions the recur or need to appear on a specific date. I have next actions automagically pop on my main list for processing my inbox, birthdays, you name it. Here are a few examples.

    {Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri} (T) @computer Process inbox
    {Mon} (T) @computer Update time entry
    {Dec 25 *20} @errand Buy Christmas presents
  3. Alias like hell to gain speed. I have aliases for several frequently used actions. This saves a lot of time. You could also assign these to function keys and customize your terminal client, but this makes them portable.
    • t='~/bin/todo.py' … lets me just type ‘t’ rather than todo.py or worse…the full path
    • tm='~/bin/todo.py -p lsp | mutt -s "Your next actions" -- you@example.com' … lets me deliver my hotlist to my e-mail in a flash. The ‘-p’ is to turn off color coding.
    • tp='~/bin/todo.py -p ls | lp -d <printer>' … lets me print off my entire list in a flash.
    • tb='~/bin/todo.py birdseye' … lets me get a macro-level view of all projects with just three keystrokes.

      (more…)

      Original post here: Terrence

      26 August 2007 | GTD, Getting Things Done, Technology, effectiveness, todo.txt | Comments

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