Back to Things

Shifted back to using Things today after experimenting with using Reminders and Fantastical. I thought I had what I wanted, with the calendar and action items together, but it quickly became a mess.

I’m not quite sure why it didn’t work out. I thought my problem was with unstructured time, so I thought that if I had my calendar and my actions together, I’d be able to fill my time. And I felt that I had a bunch of actions that I hadn’t figured out when to do them, so if I could see my gaps in time and my open actions together, then it’d be like peanut butter and jelly.

And at first it was. I thought I had finally figured it out. I thought that I had proven all of those “keep your todo list and calendar separate” bloggers wrong. I had everything at my fingertips. I could open one app to see both my events and actions, and I could plan my actions out each day.

But I was wrong, really wrong. Things never fully gelled, and everything just felt a little out of whack. I felt really inefficient and constantly like I was a beat behind. The whole point of the system is to reduce my anxiety. Admittedly, there's been a lot going on for what feels like forever, so it wasn't like I was in the best shape to begin with, and I expected a learning curve, but it never happened. I just felt like I was groping for straws in the dark.

I initially started to return to Things when I realized I had a project in front of me, a large thing that needed to get done for work, something that would have a lot of actions, and lot of loose ends that I would need to keep track of. But it seemed weird to just use Things for that, and so I was leaning towards using Drafts, which would have been a huge paradigm shift for me. I love Drafts, and I have no doubt that it could serve as a perfect task manager, but I'd have to rethink a lot of ideas about my system to get it to work.

Today I started playing with tags in Reminders. The tag functionality is really good in Reminders. Combining tags with smart lists really allows you to create some nice specific custom views. But the more I played with it, the more I realized that while the tags are great in Reminders, they don’t work so well with Fantastical (at least not yet; maybe it’ll be ironed out by the time 15 goes gold).

So I took the tasks out of Fantastical, and was pretty much instantly happier with my calendar. So then I was looking at using Reminders on its own which I probably could have done, but I really needed a project, and it seemed like a lot of work to fake a project using tags and smart lists.

I reinstalled Things, imported my reminders, and began the process of retooling the system once again. I had a mind dump that had been sitting in Drafts while I tried to figure out the best way to triage it to get it into Reminders. With a single action, I piped it into Things and was able to slice and dice the whole list pretty quickly.

It feels good to be back, but it was a good experiment. I learned a bit about what I like and what I need from my system. It feels good to have Drafts and Things working together again. And then I was able to create a work Home Screen on the iPad that had both a Things widget and a Fantastical widget side by side. It looks pretty good, and maybe that’s as close as my events and my actions need to get.