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Comment by meesterdude | Hacker News Reader

Time management: #1 tool is GTD. Not so much GTD itself, which is for task management. But it's a great start, and leads to other thinkings and evaluations that make you more effective at the things that matter to you.

But a lot of what stop us is not time, but emotions. Especially if you're trying to do creative ventures. And for that, a great read is "the war of art". my favorite quote: "Hitler found it easier to start WW2 than stare at a blank canvas".

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Another vote for GTD -- I started a week ago. For me, the real change came with breaking down goals into small tasks that can be completed in about 2 minutes. That effectively neutralizes your inertia to pick the next thing out of your "next" list to work on.

E.g. "Write an email to X requesting 2 servers for Y", rather than "Get more hardware for Y"

There was a comment a few weeks ago in another HN thread about the fact that GTD naturally prioritize low hanging fruits and random tasks. GTD is great, but should be complemented with a regular prioritization and task pruning exercise.

GTD has this: the weekly review. I think people tend to focus on the next action part of GTD, which is probably the concept I found the most useful, but the book goes into detail on regularly evaluating your priorities and goals.

Is GTD a software or philosophy? Could you please provide a link ? I could only find the link to a book .

Philosophy.

Basically:

* Write everything down that comes to your head. Review that information.

* Categorize everything into actionable tasks, or waiting items within a project (Anything that takes more than one task)

* Clear your inboxes (Physical and digital) often

* Weekly review of how the system is working for you

Coming along with that is a lot of software to try and make it really easy to follow. I personally use Todoist, a lot of people in the Apple ecosystem like omnifocus, but really any task-app and a calender can do (paper works as well).

I suggest reading the book if you are someone who struggles with productivity or wants an imporoved system. I like the book because even if you don't fully adopt the system, just about everything in the book works independently (You don't have to do EVERYTHING in the book to get an improvement, as I see often with other similar books).

Do you use the Todoist Windows app? I like Todoist and have used it for a few years but the Windows app is crumbling! They moved to the Windows Store and the new app has tons of bugs. I keep losing tasks while trying to edit them. I will rearrange a task only to find now I have a duplicate. I try to delete one and I lose both. So, the whole ‘task list’ idea has been undermined by the app’s bugs.

The legacy Windows app still works but is getting it’s own set of bugs as time goes by.

Have you had these experiences? Just wondering. I’m currently shopping for another solution. I have e-mailed them and the customer service seems to be waning along with the software support.

No, I use the Chrome App.

All Chrome apps are coming to an end in the next month or two :(.

The book is the best place to understand it, in my opinion. There's plenty of summaries, but the book is good.

But if you take nothing else: next action. When planning a list put the next physical thing you need to do (call, draft, debug a specific routine, etc), not abstract concepts.

That was by far my favorite quote too.

Thankfully, I remember it was near the very beginning.

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