I was afraid I would forget something I wanted to do today, so I used a TodoMVC demo to keep track of what I wanted to do today. I have a bad habit of “wasting” weekends just playing games or idly staring at Twitter and Mastodon – not necessarily wasted, actually, since that’s plenty of recovery and mental idle after the tightly paced weekdays.
The point is rather that I often do that and not do things that I’d want or need to do, and that’s where the list comes handy. Actually on Mastodon I was pointed to Habitica for the same purpose, and I did register too, but at first glance it felt a bit too much for what I needed (an absolutely minimal todo list) and also counter-intuitive with its game-like system.
Isn’t the whole point to get stuff done and increase focus and productivity? At first glance it seems weird that you would turn that into a game that would just draw your attention away from the stuff on your lists. I’ll check it out later again, along a few weeks, and see how filling it up with actual goals (rather than the initially auto-generated ones) will make it more compelling.
I’ve tried other similar tools before. I’ve used Trello to keep track of what I needed to do for the Sarasa 5* in GBF and also for some other projects. I use the Projects feature (I’m not sure if it’s a plugin or built-in) on GitHub for work daily and its equivalent on GitLab for a side project too. At this point I feel that it’s easier to track development progress if it’s directly integrated with the version control tool. Maybe later, with more complicated, larger stuff, that will change.
One thing I miss from these tools is the ability to organize things vertically too. They’re all built on the kanban pattern, columns named and you dump stuff into them and move items between them. It’d be nice if I could group things into rows too (effectively turning it into a table), for a topic, tag or person in charge for a row. If there is such a tool out there, do let me know!
If there isn’t one yet, I may as well just build one. I see people at work daily using paper kanbans in a way like that, and that just hurts my brain. It’s clearly so inefficient to manage, maintain and record, but they just wouldn’t listen. (Yet.)
