How I kept myself organized while creating PostWarden

These days there are so many methodologies, tools and technologies for product management, productivity, organization, task tracking, knowledge management, etc. There’s so much to choose from that I decided to share the whats, hows and whys of the methodologies, tools and technologies I used to keep myself organized while building PostWarden. For now, lets just say that it involves GTD, Pomodoro, Things for Mac, Moleskine notebooks, Notational Velocity, Dropbox and TiddlyWiki.

The methodology cocktail

I’m a guy who rarely sticks to one thing religiously, whatever it might be. There are many productivity methodologies and I’ve read all about them. I have prepared myself a cocktail with a bit of every methodology I’ve read about. If you mix GTD with Pomodoro and a bit of other minimalist methods such as Leo Babauta’s The Power of Less you will get something akin to what I use.

I break down tasks to small actionable items and group them in projects a la GTD. I also have lists of someday tasks, and next tasks a la GTD. I’ll explain more about this when I describe how I use Things for Mac.

When I do time estimations and breakdowns I do it in pomodoros (or 30 min intervals). Lately I haven’t used the Pomodoro technique that much but when I do time estimation and tracking, I use it.

I select a very small set of tasks each day and work my way through them little by little, trying to be as mindful about the tasks at hand with little distraction. In other words, I’m a singletasker, like The Power of Less advices.

Capturing with Moleskine notebooks

After trial and error I found out that if I’m not in front of my computer, for me, paper and pen are the best way to capture thoughts, ideas and possible to-dos. To help me with this I bought two sets of Moleskine large Volant Notebooks. A set of blue notebooks with plain paper for sketches and doodles and a set of black notebooks with ruled paper for notes, ideas and to-dos.

These notebooks aren’t as pretty and sturdy as other Moleskine notebooks but because of that, their size and their price, they are better suited to be carried everywhere and to write on them whatever you want, even if it’s ugly. I tried a classic Moleskine notebook but it was so pretty that I didn’t want to sketch something or write something down if it wasn’t going to look nice. In other words, I didn’t want to make mistakes. When capturing thoughts, you should be able to draw and write as ugly and chaotic as you can, and make all the mistakes you can.

On the plain papered notebooks I draw wherever there is white space. On the ruled papered notebooks I have devised a standard way of writing so I know if I’ve moved that information elsewhere. To-dos ultimately go to Things, notes and ideas ultimately go to Notational Velocity; for me, Moleskines are just for capturing.

The way I do it is very simple: On the first line I tag my entry with #Notes, #Idea or #To-do to know what type of entry it is. Below that, I write whatever I need to write. When I’m done writing I draw a line below the text to signal the end of that entry. I also add some other tags to add context to the entry, for example: I tag with #PostWarden all entries which have to do with PostWarden.

Whenever I act on an entry, I will tag it with #CAPTURED to know that I’ve entered that info elsewhere. I also cross out to-dos which I’ve done or which have been moved to Things. By doing this I can quickly scan my entries and see which ones still need to be digitized.

Ideas and notes in Notational Velocity + Dropbox

I can’t just leave all my notes and ideas in my Moleskine notebooks. It’s not searchable, backup-able and accessible everywhere.

Notational Velocity is a very simple plaintext note taking Mac app which can be easily synched with Dropbox and SimpleNote. Its search capabilities are also very useful if you have many notes.

I usually use Byword to write in Markdown and then copy the text into Notational Velocity. If I want to access the notes on the go I can do it on WriteRoom for iPhone and iPad because I save all my notes into Dropbox.

There’s nothing like having all your ideas and notes available everywhere you go and have them readable by any application out there which can read plain text files. I even opened them in Notepad.exe!

My personal wiki with TiddlyWiki

I hate wikis, I really do. They are usually ugly, hard to use and have crappy search (at least the wikis I have tried in the past). This is not the case with TiddlyWiki. I could write a whole post about TiddlyWiki (and I might do).

TiddlyWiki is a brilliant personal wiki which is just one big HTML file with a Java applet that helps modify the HTML file on the fly. No server required! I store mine on Dropbox so I can access it wherever I want!

Because it’s only one big HTML file and it’s all Javascript based, this means there are no load times and no jumping from one entry to another. When you click on a wiki link, it just pops open bellow the entry you were just looking at! It’s such a beautiful and elegant way to keep all your knowledge at hand.

I mostly store technical documentation, snippets, guides, tips, tricks, examples and so on inside my TiddlyWiki. Instead of just bookmarking a Stackoverflow entry or having to Google something every time, I write it down on TiddlyWiki. Instead of trying to remember how I solved a problem, I just add an entry in my TiddlyWiki.

To make it even more useful, I bought Fluid.app which allows me to access my TiddlyWiki right from the menu bar!

Gotta love TiddlyWiki.

How I use Things for Mac

Things is a very simple yet powerful to-do/productivity app. It was designed based on the GTD methodology but you can set it up and use it however you want. The problem with this though, is that if you don’t find a good way to setup your tasks, you’ll make a mess (I know because I did that at first).

Areas of Responsibilities and Projects

I use Things’ Areas of Responsibilities as projects; PostWarden is an Area of Responsibility, “moving back to Mexico” was an Area of Responsibility. Each task which requires many different things to be done is a Project in Things. “Implementing Offline Drafts” was a project, fixing memory leaks was a project, etc.

Individual tasks can go under the Area of Responsibility itself or under a Project. Bug fixes and small changes are usually tasks directly under the PostWarden Area of Responsibility. Projects are broken down into all the small activities which have to be done to finish that project. “Implement Offline Drafts” had 24 different tasks under it such as: “Enable autosaving of offline drafts in post composer” and “Bypass required field limitations when saving offline drafts”.

Tags, tags, and more tags

One of the most powerful things you can use in Things are tags. It’s very important to make a standard set of tags to use all the time, if you don’t do this you will end up managing your tags more than your tasks.

Here are the tags I use:

They are divided into three groups: significance, time and type.

Significance

Significance can also be understood as priority. Using numeric priorities or high, medium, low can be very confusing to me. I used plain words such as must, should and may to differentiate between things I must do, I should to or I may do. Some people call them must have, should have or nice to have. I rather use the word do, which implies action.

Basically anything that will be part of the immediate versions go in must, anything which will come in future versions will go in should, and things which are mostly just ideas or very minor things go on may.

The most important thing about significance is to constantly revise the significance of each project and task.

Time

I haven’t done much time estimation lately because I have more time available to work on tasks right now. When I started working on PostWarden, I did it mainly during some evenings and weekends so I had higher time constraints. That’s why the time tag was important before.

To help me know what things I could tackle on a given moment I decided to use Pomodoro time estimations for each task. Pomodoros are basically 30min work intervals. Individual tasks should usually be between less than a pomodoro and 4 pomodoros. If they are higher than that, then it means I might have to break the task down before working on it.

Type

This tag is mainly to give me an idea of what type of work the task or project involves. Whether it is a bug that has to be fixed, new development, testing, UI related, etc. That way I can easily find all bugs or all UI changes and so on. I also added a feedback tag which helps me identify the tasks which were created because of user feedback.

Today, Next, Scheduled and Someday

Things has a global list of tasks and projects which separates them based on when they should be taken care of. An important thing you should do is to put everything on someday at first. If you don’t do this your next list will be huge, it will be too overwhelming and make you want to hide under the desk.

For me, someday is a pretty place, it means that the task is something that needs to be done but (for now) it doesn’t matter when; the task is safely captured and I can forget all about it.

I use the ability to schedule tasks so I can forget about the tasks I scheduled, which usually are important enough that Things should remind me about the task’s importance in a later date. As expected, it also works great for tasks which have a deadline.

In next I put what I’ll be working on in the next few days. The most important things which I should tackle right now go here. In PostWarden’s case, only tasks and project which will be part of the next release go here, or project which will take a lot of time and should be started right away even if they won’t be part of the next release.

I rarely use today, unless there is something I really must do today. I usually just go down through my next list and stop when I’m tired, hungry or I decide that it’s enough for the day.

Everything comes together

Tasks are organic beings; they grow, they reproduce and they die. You can’t keep a list of tasks without review or chaos will come. You must constantly revise each task’s tags and state.

Some things you thought you must do might become things you should do or things you don’t have to do at all. Most likely than not, you will keep adding new tasks to your projects because you didn’t think about everything when you broke them down. When you are done with the things you have inside next you should go through your someday list and find which things can be moved to next.

Whenever I review my tasks (usually once a week) I first look at the list of must do tasks, then the should do tasks and then the may do tasks, cleaning them all up. I revise every single task’s significance; I make sure I have a task for user suggestions and for ideas I’ve had; I delete any task which is obsolete; I make sure I don’t have duplicate tasks; I create new tasks missing from existing tasks, etc.

This is they way it works for me. I know there are simpler apps out there and other more powerful apps out there too. This workflow does it for me and if you’d like to try it, I hope it works for you too.

Conclusions

Some people are religious about their tools, methodologies and so on, I am not. If I find a better way to do things I will tweak my ways to improve them.

A word of caution though. There are so many ways to do this and so many people dedicate themselves to come up with new ways and new tools, that it can be overwhelming. Don’t waste your time trying everything under the sun. It’s good to experiment but stick with something that fits and adjust it to your needs.

Another very important thing. When using software, make sure your data is not bound to the app or that you can at least easily export your data either natively through the app or by writing a script that does it for you.

At the end of the day, what matters is that you are comfortable and free to do the work you want to do, and to do it great.