I’ve used most of last year trying to fix my task management system (or ), after multiple periods of both Things, OmniFocus and various other systems (including paper, Agenda, some text file based ones etc). I’m now mostly at a good place with it.

To be honest it all probably started to break down in the latter half of 2022. Starting ADHD medication made a lot of things I’ve been overcompensating about very overwhelming.

Things

It was in Things until the new version of OmniFocus came out. My main reason for changing then, and now, is custom perspectives. If things had a way to have more custom views in the side bar as in Yesterday, Tomorrow or something like the searches you can do in shortcuts I’d probably still be there.

Plus I really miss having real support for flagging and putting projects on hold. My solution in Things was to just push them out with their “date” field (why not call them defer dates?!).

And OmniFocuses forecast view is so much better.

Also some other minor annoyances with Things:

• Their defer dates are so fucking weird. They have a date, until it is today and then it is just today forever. And you can set tonight, but on only the current day.
• I always miss being able to write tasks as an outline when I use it; like you can get around it, kind of. But having nested folders, projects, and nested tasks is way more flexible than Areas, Projects, Heading, Tasks and Checklists.

Checklists

The one weird thing about my system is that I have a bunch of ridiculous checklist templates that I use to generate daily, weekly, monthly etc checklists for various parts of my life. They are not recurring tasks or projects because I think it is easier to deal with them when I just generate them once a week based on needs.

In addition I have regular Projects. Plus work stuff. Shopping lists. And various more bucket list like things.

The checklists are just generated with task paper plus some shortcuts that insert due dates etc before sending them to OmniFocus. For the rest I set some defer dates (mostly in the checklists to be honest) and for the rest I just put anything except what I’m focusing on right now as Paused. And I have various tags to make it easy to manage through the OmniFocus filtering.

Projects

The way I manage things is that for actions in my “Projects” section (meaning not checklists, not shopping lists etc) have a hard limit of 150 actions. If there is more than 150 available, I need to pause or defer something. And I also put due dates on things more as a reminder if I should pause or drop it.

In order to avoid me doing a tiny bit on a shit load of things I try my best to complete projects before taking in new stuff.

As far as I can tell the current scheme is that the “casks” in homebrew are named is as follows:

• AppName -> appname
• App Name -> app-name

I really hate it. Because it is not intuitive and I can never remember it, and weirdly enough half of the time mess it up in either direction.

My phone had been weird for a while, so I did a backup & restore a few weeks ago, and it seems to have solved almost all of the issues I had.

Except for a few banking (and similar) related apps that required me to delete and re-install them, everything else worked more or less out of the box without any issues.

Recently I decided to get cases for my AirPods Cases. I have two because, I usually leave my old pair in my gym bag to avoid being there without any.

But, even though there are visual differences between the two, I prefer it to be so obvious I can see it without picking up the case.

You can find a lot of fun a quirky ones that really fit your personality. However, I’d wish they were compatible with wireless charging.

I’m a huge fan in covering my devices in stickers. Partly to make them unique and mine, showing a bit more of my personality. Plus it makes it much harder for people to pick up your laptop by mistake when leaving a meeting room or whatever.

I usually keep my work laptops a bit more safe for work than my personal ones.

One of the things about AirPods that still annoy me after using them on and off since the early days of the very first version of the regular AirPods, is how unreliable the charging sometimes is.

It was true for the O.G and it is true for both generations of the AirPods Pro.

Sometimes they are really terrible at detecting that they’re in the case. Not sure if it is a problem with the pods or the case or both. Probably related to dirt.

I don’t expect magic, but I’d love for them to detect that there was a problem like this and tell me what to do about it.

There are a few things about Things that drive me a bit nuts. All of what I am talking about is possible to do through shortcuts, but that isn’t something you can integrate into widgets etc.

A big thing I hate is how it isn’t possible to have saved searches in the side bar. For example, I’d love to have the “tomorrow” list always there.

But in general, in a shortcut you can do rather complex queries, sort them in interesting ways etc and show it as a search in the app. Like only show me todos or only show me projects.

It isn’t that well integrated with the rest of the system though.

The same thing kind of goes for the Headings you can add to projects. They’re kind of invisible outside of the project view.

As mentioned many times before on here, I’ve been doing intermittent fasting on and off since 2021, after I hit the end of the useful life of calorie logging.

An interesting detail of doing that is that, when it sticks, and you end up with a working system, where you do it most days but not all, your body isn’t very happy with you when you step outside of that.

For me it is fine to eat terrible as long as I limit eating to 4-6 hours a day or don’t stop fasting for more than two days.

Always good to get to the point where it is too much of a hassle to cheat on yourself.

After a few weeks on this M3 MacBook Pro it is amazing to coming from the last generation Intel MacBook Pro’s how fast, silent and not stupid hot this machine is. Plus how ridiculous the battery life is.

Not uncommon that I can do an entire work day in the home / couch office without connecting a charger.