Open Q - organisational systems

[hwarium]

Question to moots and flyby visitors alike: how do you organise your life?! What do you use to track the myriad of sisyphean tasks that composite the human existence: chores, life admin, hobbies, social commitments and big events, side projects, reading lists, expense tracking and budgeting, journalling, article archiving, correspondance..... .... ..or perhaps do you just let go and speedrun raw.

I'm thinking about resetting some systems because items have been slipping off my mind into the ether. I'm currently looking at some kind of app for reoccurring tasks (ticktick / things 3 / microsoft to-do) and consolidating calendars, but would love to know what has worked, or not worked, for this corner of the internet.

Current profile:

• digital systems: android phone + pc + OS + iOS
• journalling, planning, expense tracking, general list-making: pen and paper (jibun techo + leuchtturm)
• budgeting: excel
• thoughts dump, flash to-dos, gym notes: google keep
• holiday planning: google maps and google sheets
• hobby tracking: todoist but ineffective

Comments

[hwarium]

I am the animal crossing villager punching the air after catching sea bass THIS IS THE CATCH I WANTED!! I'm just like you I love organising and micromanaging my own life AND talking about it. Like you said—best system is the one that just works & I'm also the person who loves talking about and setting up systems rather than using them haha.

thank you for sharing!! gosh what a fun read. I DO have questions about housework!! Does that go in your calendar as well? I'm thinking about the switch up between day-to-day habits, to weekly cleans, to some things that you do quarterly or even annually (e.g. vacuuming vs changing your toothbrush) is it a moveable list? an army of individual tasks perfectly scheduled? +++ if your plans change (friend drops in for dinner), do you find it bothersome moving the tasks around to the next weekend?

I will go check out Wallabag and Linkding and raindrop and pikapods AND singlefile, those are sites/apps I've never even heard of so I'm so glad you took the time to refer them!!

hope you're having a good week friend!!

[themorninglark]

I've found my people... you are my organisational kindred people 🫶🏻

Yes housework goes into the life admin calendar, exactly as you described! They are an army of individually scheduled recurring tasks. I don't really have daily things that I need to schedule cos I will naturally remember to do things when daily is their cadence, but change sheets, change toothbrush, wash bathmat, vacuum etc are all in there as recurring anywhere from weekly to quarterly. If my plans change, I can just move that one task to the next free timeslot without messing with the rest of the calendaring.

Because of all this the life admin calendar does look very crowded, so I don't keep it turned on all the time. But I am one of those people who has like a whole bunch of calendars (one for social meetups, one for fun things, one for health-related things, one that's just for miscellaneous things like 'make sure i'm at home at this time to receive parcel') so I'm used to toggling them on and off when I want to see them or not.

Raindrop is very good for bookmarking and read later! Singlefile is a browser extension that saves any page as... a single file... haha. I just save them into a folder of articles that is synced everywhere on my cloud storage. Pikapods, Wallabag and Linkding are like a whole other rabbit hole of selfhosted apps and I feel like it is more techy than most people need, but very interesting to learn about!

Perhaps I should have led with this question (I was too hype to talk about stuff), but what do you find is not working about your current system? Like where is the friction/slippage happening, I'm curious!

[hwarium]

🫶🏻 everything is 俺を構築すんのは毎日の行動であって"結果"は副産物にすぎん

IT'S OKAY I WANT TO DO THE MARKET RESEARCH!!

Life has been inconsistent with big events in the last few years that threw my systems out of a loop, i.e. I drop everything to focus on getting that One Thing Done, and when it's over I realise everything else has been languishing (life admin, exercise, hobbies, everything on the important-not-urgent eisenhower square). Especially around holiday periods with frequent social events, I feel like I'm running life on blinkers only focusing on the Next Thing, that when I have free time, my mind blanks out as to what I'm supposed to be doing or even what I enjoy doing for rest! I don't mind the rush but I dislike that feeling of disassociation. And I've missed appointments recently which has /never/ happened before.

I want to be more mindful of my life and my habits. I'm thinking about creating a dashboard that lets me see, at a glance, what's on, what's coming up, and what's on my mind.

the tension points on the triangle are (1) wanting to minimising screentime esp phone time, (2) acknowledging that I use my phone a lot / phone is always there / phone can be used productively, and (3) avoiding gamification of tasks so that I learn to associate satisfaction with the task itself rather than the acknowledgement of completion an app gives me

A digital calendar might work! I've used google calendar/todoist in school and it worked because of the strict deadlines, but fell off in late uni because it became too hard to manage -> every morning was spent rescheduling to-dos. But perhaps the key is to be more intentional with what is scheduled and have seperate calendars for different items? Food for thought!!

[themorninglark]

aw the warmth I felt welling up from inside when I read that line 🥲

Thank you for sharing!! It sounds like you have been a bit swamped, so I'm gonna go out on a limb and venture a guess that actually your problem might not be that your current tools aren't working for you but that you simply have too much on your plate to humanly do in the time and energy that you have, like your problem isn't task management, it's energy management? I feel like when this happens the first thing to do is to take stock and subtract as much as you can rather than add on new tools to manage all the things. Are there obligations you can let go of rather than trying to squeeze them in?

I think it's also helpful to really try to clock how much time it takes you to do things cos often it's easy to underestimate this... for a long time I was frustrated with myself for never going to sleep on time, then I stopped to calculate how much time I actually need to do all the wind-down things I want to do (stretch, journal, brush teeth/skincare, read) and I found that I need to block out up to an hour for all this not to feel rushed. In my head, it took like 15-20 minutes, and I just wasn't allocating enough time. Obviously anyone can tell it does not actually take 15-20 minutes when looking at all these activities, but heads are weird.

Minimising phone usage is a whole other topic! Do you have thoughts/ideas for what you think would work best for you?