The harmful assumptions we make about tasks | Hacker News Reader

The harmful assumptions we make about tasks

blog.cyrusroshan.com

56 pointscroshan11 comments

Maybe I’m prematurely becoming a pedantic old man, but “harmful”? Come on!

Smoking is harmful. Having permanent tasks may be fatiguing, but if that constitutes being harmful it would seem life has become too good (which is surprising given the current harmful pandemic!)

"Harmful" is virtually a term of art in software development, ever since Dijkstra's 1968 article, "Goto Statement Considered Harmful."

Harmful now just means a millenial feels ever so slightly uncomfortable.

I read this as harmful to the company building task management software more than harmful to the person using the software.

I use Post-it notes for the "personal day-level" tasks, littered around my desk. The idea being that the task is now literally cluttering up my desk, which triggers a cleanliness anxiety to help motivate the completion of the task.

If I fucked up and the task is important or I do want to track it over a longer period, I'll either copy it into Notion, or stick it into my notebook directly, where it lives forever.

That’s a great approach! It reminds me of a similar approach I did when I still commuted to work: putting the sticky notes directly on the laptop.

At the end of the day, I’d put the laptop in my backpack, and the sticky notes would get crumpled, so I would have to write new ones for the following day. It didn’t work as well, though, because I’d occasionally lose sticky notes, and forget what I did yesterday.

This is an interesting idea. I use Org-mode, so I'm thinking about doing this: I have a set of searches I run every week or so to find tasks or projects to archive (which places them in a separate file that I can still search, but is not in my face in my main TODO files): https://github.com/telotortium/doom.d/blob/ceb88ea05a2c8a5d5....

Right now I just archive tasks and projects that have been completed or cancelled, but I'm thinking about archiving all tasks and projects I haven't worked on for at least a quarter. That way I can essentially forget about them but still be able to locate them if I really need them.

I've been using Linear (https://linear.app) a little recently (no affiliation), and it has settings to automatically close and/or archive issues that haven't been completed in the configured time period. It seems it would help with the neverending backlog.

At work, I use Planner x To-Do in Teams to keep organized. I have buckets labeled Today, This Week, This Month and This Quarter. Everyday, I slide tasks as required. I can appreciate the point on permanent tasks and fatigue but they have a place in my workflow. I would rather slide something over to This Week or This Month if I don't need to do it Today as opposed to checking it and recreating it.

Not sure this applies but I’ll just plug my super early stage CLI task manager (github.com/ardunn/dex). It’s FOSS, kind of like taskwarrior but it tells you how to prioritize your tasks. It fills in the “personal management” space for me quite well, but doesn’t integrate with any online services like Amna does.

Multitasking doesn't work, more people need to accept it and move on. Be productive instead of feeling productive in your organizational planning and tasks, don't spread your attention thin - that's what should be considered harmful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com