Now I don't delete things. I put a little + at the start of the line for anything I did, a - for anything I decided not to do, and a / for anything I did partially but needs to be revisited. I write a new list each day, carrying-forward items that I feel are worth revisiting.
And what's huge is that I can scroll down and see previous lists, years worth, and read all the stuff I did. It's enormous compared to the remaining todos, and apparently that's psychologically important.
If I have 50 pages of things I spent time on, I must actually be doing something!
As a scientist, it's best practice to keep a daily notebook called a "lab diary" where you document your work, e.g. details of experiments conducted, day by day.
It is sometimes important to prove when you had a particular idea (e.g. for patenting purposes or copyright lawsuits or documenting the history of a field), and it is important to keep track of the details of experiments in order to be able to reproduce them. For that latter aspect, I recommend self-documenting data nowadays, i.e. data that comes with meta-data to explain how it was derived, such as parameters used to create data in an experiment, which I often encode in POSIX filenames (e.g. <method>-n=<n>-iter=<iter>-k=<k>.eval => "randombaseline-n=20-iter=500-k=3.eval").
Of course you can maintain such a diary in the form of a plain text file, and I often do that as additional companion, but files are editable, you may lose them, and they have not much worth in terms of serving as a proof; a paper diary with daily entries, in contrast, is telling a story that is less likely to be fake.
It also makes you accountable (in case management asks you what you did on March 3 last year, you'd open your lab diary and could say "that was when we had the meeting where we decided to cancel the XYZ project"), and you can use it to extract achievements for your annual or quarterly performance reviews from it.
I use a similar text prepend now with digital todo lists. It still works, but not quite as much. Perhaps because it's not new anymore.
Now that it’s in Git, feel free to delete each DONE task.
And finally, have a cron job that on the hour does something like ‘git diff > message.txt; git commit -F message.txt’
<— this way, you have your day’s TADA list AND your list in now searchable with dates via ‘git log’
(This was my TODO list for years until I declared TODO bankruptcy and have gone back to physical cards)
I suppose a simpler way to achieve both goals is to alias `todo` to `vim -O ~/.todo ~/.tada` and simply move items from one file to another :-)
It's surprisingly useful; I share it with my coworkers and we often consult it if we notice something has been behaving differently starting at a certain date to see what was going on then.
I keep it in a simple text file, running in a tmux on a server, so I have connections to it from my laptop and my desktop. It's currently 19,509 lines.
Don't you have commit logs for this??
It's very powerful having just a few sentences I can read about what was going on specifically on a given day.
Maybe it makes more sense to have a box per week instead of per day. Or even per month!
At least in my own life I've noticed that focusing on daily output tends to be demoralizing, whereas if I look back over the months I am often amazed by what has come out of me.
+ Get out of bed before sundown
I've actually had good conversations with nervous junior devs to help them see the value of their contributions this way. There's a lot less reason to stress out if you're working steadily and see that things are going according to plan.
I know devs can be focused on the literal tasks at hand, but the "10k ft view" is not just a cheesy thing people say and it should not be ignored. It gives perspective.
Sounds like the weekly report most of my bosses have demanded.
The problem here is that they think it forces you to have an accomplishment. Just write what you did in short form. IT can be "Was very stressed and couldn't get anything substantial done, attended the monthly developer meeting and did some work on documentation".
I do this as well to better remember what I have done at work, to quickly be able to document my value towards the company, and to have some "tabs" to show if there are any questions regarding what I did a day.
Example: day before Christmas eve - the last workday in this region I found myself standing in line to a car wash. There was just one guy ahead of me, but those who were already soaping up their vehicles didn't seem to be in a hurry and it was already 4pm, so sundown over here and I still had other errands run that day.
I turned around and the car is currently still dirty, but it'll remain so until I can make time for that, so in 2026.
A todo list that feeds into a calendar (with a high degree of flexibility) that feeds into a tada list.
I’ve been working on this casually for the better part of a year and hope to release something that is home-hostable later in 2026, once I’ve lived with it for a bit.
Like I don’t want to remember that I need to do something, I just want a time slot in my calendar that auto populates against a set of constraints, so I can go from moment to moment in a flow. I want to be able to control that todo list and my goals’ time/space constraints with natural language—not some godforsaken form that gives you carpal tunnel. And then I want to see how my progress grows and how much I’m committing to what I want to do.
It keeps a record of things done and lived. In terms of planning and task keeping, the paper format also forces me to let things fall off the list if they won't get done after all.
I also joke that I'll be the person who can actually answer if one day an investigator asks me "What were you doing on the night of November 22nd, 2019?"
Keeping an archive of things I’ve done is great for my mental health. Occasionally, I even look search through it and the associated notes and fish out something useful.
Ah I thought (and hoped) it was gonna be a list of epiphanies, interesting learnings, new sweetness. You know… taDA!
I often feel like im better at starting (or just planning) projects then seeing them through, so maybe doing this will force me to finish something.
Extra word there
