Notion

Organization is fundamental to the development of civilization. Advanced economics are productive because of organization. If I wanted to taste big successes in life, I needed to organize everything about my life. I was doing good things, but they were all random, only reacting to the environment and systems outside. When I got a system in place with Notion I got a lot more productive and peaceful. I was able to do things that appeared incredibly hard so easily.

The problem is with having several long-term tasks. You have so many things to do. The general advice is to break things to smaller tasks. But nobody tells you how exactly to do that. (Maybe no one can, you have to learn on your own and I did just that). And they are all different. Some tasks are short. Some are long. Some you have to take actions frequently. Some require tracking a lot of things. Some require you to wait until you wake up with new ideas. You can't finish one to move to other. You have to do all concurrently.

All of this I managed by getting this new system in place. How I got there took a lot of time. I arrived at it after using Notion for different things at first.

The first effective and proper use of Notion was when I went from reading one book at a time to many at a time. I got this eye opening advice on YouTube that you have to really read multiple books. This woman told me that you should read what you are in mood for. You can read more and be involved more. That was when I went for Notion's board style database to have books in multiple columns. It was setup good and I loved the process of moving items around in the board.

Then I got to making a table of all my anxieties. It was transformative. I was coming to this table at random times to add new items and notes to existing items. Suddenly, I was solving a lot of my life's problems easily. Things in head are hard to gapple with. In a database, it is so easy. A lot of problems were disappering.

Later I realized that this is the way to deal with habits. The system of tracking habits by forcing myself to add ticks or counts was wrong. It was not working. I decided one to make a big table in Notion of all my life's goals. I did some recording over a few days and the number of items crossed one hundred. There! This was why things were so burdensome. How do you focus on all those things floating in your head? The mind can't hold it all. You need to get them out on a list.

After much tinkering, things developed to a system. I have a list of projects and in it are are board of tasks. There is also views for all tasks in progress and completed things(to look and feel proud). There is a pie chart of the statuses ("Not Started", "Paued", "In Progress", "Completed" and "Abandoned").

Tasks are not like what you have in a todo app. These are not something you can do and tick off. There is some structured data like start date, end date and tags. But most of the content is in freeform text. Bullet lists of brainstorming, links, checkboxes (these are for one step tasks), mind dumps, all go in the page.

Examples for tasks are health, mental health, productivity, subjects I am learning, work projects, travels. In the projects there are tasks. Tasks are like "Get autophagy working", "Read book on LLMs", "How can I make my walks productive", "Try mindfulness with music", "Where am I wasting money lately?", "Retrospect on my stoicism journey", and things related to software features I am coding, visa application, and a whole lot of things. Everything I can't do in one simple step, they go as a task here. I have more than one thousand tasks recorded already.

I get to abandon tasks a lot. With To-Do apps, you have to delete hem. I hate doing that -- losing records. That was another reason that I wasn't comfortable with To-Do apps. The OCD part of me didn't want to create the tasks that would end up deleted so I was not adding new things readily. Here I have freedom. I experiment, and I fail and I move them to the "Abandoned" column. The notes are still there.

Deadlines are not my thing. You know you finished something only when they are finished. I can always rush and do things fast but stil you can't predict when something is going to be over. I keep doing things bit by bit and when something is finished or abandoned, I mark the end date and move them out of the "In Progress" state.

I now go to the task list every day. Many times a day. Sometime at the desk. Sometimes from the bed. Sometimes while commuting. I open one task and put some notes. When you have all the information in front of you, ideas flow. When I am reading textbooks, i keep the relevant task open. I mark the time I start a session and the time I end a session. Easy to add timestamps. I am stuck at something, I brainstorm and find out why I am that way. When I am dealing with bureaucracy, I put all the things I have to track and communicate here. Every task's notes is different.

Rigid plans don't work in my line of work or in today's world. You can't predict what happens when. You don't want to do things you are not in the mood for. You have to react to things only. You have to do things piece by piece all the time. Opening the database, reading things, making a small decision and noting things down accomplishes a lot. These small things compound and then you discover that you have tackled a hard task.