Use of colours besides priority

[Vincent_Tang]

I never set any deadlines for myself if its a personal project, for me it doesn’t make much sense too. Sometimes I really have no idea how long a personal project will take, mostly because I’ve never done it before and won’t know until I start working on it

However, when I do have deadlines, its always because I’m working on a project with somebody else.

• For those deadlines if its assigned and ending within 1-2 weeks, there’s a really good chance I will just simply remember it. If not, I just write a stickynote and I have a magnetic whiteboard that I designate different locations in a kanban fashion (e.g. TODO - DOING - DONE). I find that a very simple approach makes collaborating much easier for everyone involved too, since its so low tech. I also try to apply David Allen’s GTD - if you can do it in 5 minutes just do it right then and there / get it over with approach

• For events and things like meeting up with lunch with a friend, going to an event, etc. There’s not much thought process behind it so it just goes in google calendar + synced with my android homepage widget + any message reminder settings

• For really far away deadlines like “Replace Oil in car 6 months from today”, I just use https://www.followupthen.com/ email program. Basically, I send mail to it, and it comes back to me 6 months later. You could use this with thunderbird, gmail, etc. I use this all the time for keeping track of forgetful people (e.g. your collaborating with a vendor for a RFQ (request for quote), a freelancer, etc and you have a feeling they’ll forget or purposely won’t respond to your email). Its just fire it off and forget it until it comes back, mark it off when its complete. You could do so many things in this application that it could suit anyones need.

• For things that aren’t really important or urgent in nature, I usually just googlekeep widget on my android phone. I only use 1 pinned tab. Older tasks / notes not logged sit at the top of the list, newer ones down below. Everytime I finish a task I cross it out. It never touches dynalist unless its supposed to be a long term note. A lot of times I’ll jot down some notes I want to log into my dynalist, since the dynalist app isn’t that good like workflowy’s. Also, I’m forced to reread all my undone tasks everytime, since I have to scroll all the way down to add notes. So its imperative I cleanse out finished tasks / transferred notes every now and then.

The absence of a dashboard does kind of suck, and when the API is going to get released, I would want a “popup” dynalist dialog box that keeps reminding me of things I have not done yet or have marked down as a unchecked bulletpoint.

I’d probably have a tagpane as well with the API

I wrote some API integration drafts I would probably look into when its released on one of my comments. A lot of those ideas I wrote weren’t well hashed out though

Gathering API v0.1 ideas

I agree with David Lee’s post here ★ 1:★ get / post parent and child to batch process notes I would like to a * GET and *POST / PATCH to for a specific ID and its child ID / nodes, for text This way you can send a GET request to a parent ID, and then POST update anything in the child ID’s contents I could specify which parent ID I would want to work with, so I update information at whatever location is relevant So this would let me parse the data easier. For instance, the !date parameters ar…

As to dynalist and what I use it for

I try to think of dynalist at least for me, as a digital clipboard / scratchboard.

Basically,

…pretend computers didn’t exist.

…Pretend the internet didn’t exist either

…Pretend you had to do a task like figuring out how to get your car fixed and have no idea what the root problem is

• What sort of notes would you take on a notebook? (thoughts, ideas, diagrams?)
• How would you organize it? By day, category, component, what to buy, etc?

Now take that same thought process, put it in dynalist. Except now you have more tools at your disposal instead of a piece of paper

The 2nd reason I use dynalist as digital clipboard/ scratchboard (relates to all the organization I mentioned about sprints and projects). This XKCD reference basically summarizes it (you have to click the link picture its an imgur gallery)

https://imgur.com/gallery/3uyRWGJ

Picking back where your at it in your thought process is extremely hard if you get interrupted doing something very complicated

Now I can get interrupted at any point and not feel frustrated that I lost track of what I was doing

Not only interruptions. I could just take a super long 1 month vacation break somewhere and pick back up where I left off like it was yesterday

I could also just not do work on a skillset for a whole year, and pick it back up like it was yesterday as well, given if I placed that project under “Shelved projects” with many tagged sprint notes / well condensed notes

There’s no such thing as a memory forgetting curve if you take good notes.

Forgetting curve

A good application of this is elon musk. You specialize in as many subjects as you want without limitations - granted you take good scalable notes (he did it with book libraries), the slang term is called “Expert generalists”

How to Think Like Elon Musk