#post

Things 3 workflow attempt log

TODO: publish these a separate entries (not this big one), then reference them in a “Things 3” note via backlinking.

tl;dr: I’ve been trying various approaches for years and am still finding I have pain points. The experimentation continues.

Current: Group Today view into a minimal set of headings

Today:
- grouped by area headings: Morning, Appointments, Recurring, In Progress, WIP project tasks, Bedtime
- Recurring: move today’s to In Progress list; reschedule the rest
- WIP Project tasks: move today’s to In Progress list (i.e. out of project); reschedule or unschedule the rest
- After the morning, only the following groupings should remain: Appointments, In Progress, Bedtime
Next Up area:
- collects projects and tasks I want to get to soon
- mix of Anytime + Someday, for sorting/planning purposes
Other areass
- represent ongoing life areas
- all projects and area tasks in Someday

Pros:

Today: max 5 groups to read and manually sort (too many headings makes it hard to sequence tasks by priority regardless of their grouping)
Today: groupings generally reflect the priority for the day (get morning tasks out the way, then don’t miss a meeting, then get important recurring tasks out of the way or reschedule them, then spend the rest of the day plowing through what’s currently in progress)
In Progress: encourages keeping the list short by showing the reality of the length of the combined list (as opposed to scattering the list across many groupings)
Next Up: prevents totally forgetting about projects/tasks that don’t have to be done TODAY but should be done SOON
Overall, Today is more usable as it combines the best of both worlds: grouping by heading looks nicer and reduces some sorting toil, and minimizing how many grouping there are allows more flexibility in interleaving tasks from different areas and projects on a given day

Cons:

There’s a temptation to want to use the Appointments grouping to map out the day’s task sequence (hoping to just use that as a calendar reference and use In Progress for sequencing)

Pros:

For a few days, it was really nice to have total freedom of the order of Today tasks

Cons:

In practice, I only look at Today most of the time
I rarely looked at Anytime (in spite of tasks reminding me to do so)
Anytime looked really cluttered to me, and always prioritized the areas by their fixed sort order
Anytime: having to click/tap to unhide tasks is a pain compared to skimming
Anytime: I much prefer to viewing areas and projects directly than scrolling through this view
After a few days, the sense that I was losing track of relatively important tasks (because they were not scheduled and relied on me rediscovering them in the Anytime view) grew and grew
Overall, I want to take everyone’s advice and use Things this way, but I lose track of too much and don’t want to have to keep returning to the giant tasks lists and make new decisions about priority; I’d rather do that less frequently and triage via the Today view

Today: tasks grouped under headings: Morning, Meetings, Urgent, Work, (insert all separate life areas), Bedtime

Pros: