Don’t play “catch and release” with your thoughts. Your ideas have value, but tend to arrive when you least expect them. By making it a habit to “capture” and save them, you can allow them to live forever in a trusted system that reflects your goals and interests. This also leaves your mind free and clear to come up with even more ideas.
— Tiago Forte
Quick Capture
I get ideas & inspiration often while working on others and TickTick’s quick capture allows me to quickly jot that down and get back to what I was doing without missing a beat. * From iOS * From MacOS * From Chrome
The Inbox
My digital note list. This is where I cull through all the things & set follow up timing and lists for.
Reference Seth Godin’s work around a system over outcomes. You have control over showing up, you have less control over the outcome, but if you create a system where you produce consistently and are constantly working on improving, you will be doing what you can.
My Lists
- What are they:
- Strategic Work vs Junk Work
- Routines
- Home
- Evening
- Personal Development
- Youtube
- Youtube Channel
- Youtube Video Ideas
- Productivity Blog
- Reviews
- Family
- Store
- Content Backlog
- Ideas
Routines
Prior to embracing a digital todo list, I was a very reactionary person. Things didn’t get done until I noticed they were needed. For example in my twenties I wouldn’t go and get a haircut until I realized that my hair was way too long. In my mid twenties I finally realized the value of pre-scheduling haircuts and how I didn’t have to look like a bum between haircuts. Once I figured this out I could apply this same pattern to other things in life. Cutting the dog’s nails, changing air filters in the house, getting the car inspected, etc. Setting up repeats when creating routines.
Calendar View / Time Blocking
- How I do my timeblocking and make sure that my plan for the day makes sense. In a perfect world I would review this each night in preparation for the next day, but I typically review this with my morning cup of coffee before work.
- Time blocking, including thinking time. Articles. Anything I want to get done. There is a much greater chance that you will follow through on your thinking time if you put it on a calendar. I used to do this in Fantastical, but I found that if I had to move that time for whatever reason (it happened a lot) that I would get phantom notifications and it quickly got the point that I was hating Fantastical. I worked with their support team, but ultimately it sounds like a limitation in how their push notification implementation with iOS and it wasn’t fixable. So I solved this by moving my Timeblocking to TickTick as it could represent my Google Calendars similarly to Fantastical. (It does have a less than desirable quirk where declined meetings will continue to show). TickTick I’ve reported this (please fix it).
Pros
- Has Calendar Support that Things 3 was (intentionally) missing which made timeboxing and aligning with meeting schedules challenging
- Really good support for attachments (this was legitimately the thing that made me leave Things 3)
- Syncing between multiple devices
- Native + Web
- Excellent Quick Capture
- Foldered Lists are pretty useful
- Free Tier will likely work for many people
Cons
- Template support exists, but is a bit clunky
- Invites you decline still show up in TickTick. This is especially painful for weekly recurring meetings. (Fix this TickTick)
- You can’t move calendar events the way you can tasks, so you still need to use another calendar app such as Fantastical or Google Cal
- Calendar view is more readable in the Browser than on the Mac App
- The difference used to be huge, now it’s just minor.