The classes of to-do

3/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.

As in, what types of to-do are there.

Observations

This text should be considered an RFC, v0.1. In non-nerd terms: I'd like your feedback, and this is a very early draft.

I would potentially like to define these 'classes of to-do' as a standard in the context of Johnny.Decimal.

We use terms MUST, SHOULD, etc. as per RFC2119.

We classify these by priority: 4 is lower than 1. This aligns with most service desk ticketing systems: a 'priority 1' is the highest priority incident.

If I say 'we'll discuss this later' I might mean in a later article.

Priority 4 (P4): someday/maybe/'tickler file'

These things aren't really 'to-dos' at all. They're ideas of things that you might like to do, maybe, some day.

Sometimes these are unrealistic. The other day I wrote a task, 'buy an old Volvo'. I'm almost certainly never going to buy an old Volvo, and I'm certainly not going to buy one in the next five years.

So why even write this down? Because it forms part of your story. These are the things that tell you who you want to be. Remembering them guides you through life. They keep you on some sort of track.

They're good, in other words; don't stop writing them down. You will actually do some vanishingly small percentage of these things, and it doesn't matter if you don't do the rest.

But you MUST NOT allow these 'tasks' to clutter the things you actually need to do. They MUST, therefore, be in a separate task system.

And I don't mean that they should be somehow tagged-flagged-foldered-filtered away from your actual to-dos while being stored in the same task system. No. They MUST be kept in a separate system.

Definition: a 'task system' is an isolated system where one or more tasks -- i.e. to-do-like items -- is kept. 'Post-it notes' is one task system. 'Apple Reminders' is another. 'A text file' is another.

We use the term 'task system' vs. 'to-do system' to move away from the term 'to-do'. Not everything you write down is something you must, one day, do.

P3: Should do/nice to do

You should eat more vegetables. You should floss. You should update your blog software more frequently. You should cancel that subscription that you don't use. You should prepare that recipe that you saved two years ago. You should buy someone flowers when it isn't their birthday.

But if you do not, nothing catastrophic happens. Life goes on -- with inconveniences or minor costs that your inaction has introduced, perhaps -- but, nevertheless.

These things are actions: they are things 'to do'. You should do them. So they SHOULD exist in your primary task system.

However, they MUST NOT ever nag you with an alert or alarm. If a 'should do' task interrupts your focus, your system is broken.

Therefore these tasks MUST NOT have a 'due date'. They're not allowed to make you feel bad if you don't do them. You look at them on your schedule.

So how does this stuff ever get done?

P3 tasks are quality-of-life improvements. If you did more of them, life would be incrementally better.

The problem with our current handling of P3 tasks is that they pop up and interrupt us all the time, while we're really not in the mood to do them. So if we did everything that our task manager told us to do, when it told us to do it, we'd be all over the place. It'd be a productivity shambles.

I think we know this, if only subconsciously. That's why we don't do so many of these things when previous-us decided that we should.

The other problem is that it's easily possible to have hundreds of P3 tasks. They can quickly overwhelm the rest of your system.

The solution is to implement strategies to deal with this problem, which we'll get to later.

Project subtasks

Note that many if not most subtasks that are in service of the completion of a larger project are 'should do' tasks. The vast majority of your work does not deserve the privilege of interrupting you while you are doing something else.

You know it's the job. You know you need to do it: writing it down is more of a memory/planning thing than a reminder/nagging thing.

P2: To do

Now we're in to the stuff that you really actually should do. Not kidding.

Pay your rent: you get kicked out, eventually, if you don't. Cancel an annual subscription that will renew for $500. Submit your timesheets before 2pm on Friday or you eventually get a formal warning. Renew your driver's licence or you're catching the bus.¹

These tasks SHOULD live in the same task system as your P3 tasks. Because as we'll see, P1 tasks SHOULD also live in their own system, and if P3 and P2 don't co-exist then we've got 4 task systems and that's obviously silly.

I'll summarise all of this with a table, later.

P2 tasks are essentially P3 tasks but in this case you MAY set a due date. Although with good processes and habits, which we'll discuss later, I think we can mostly avoid due dates.

Because the problem is the same as we described just above: every interruption knocks you off what you were doing. If we can design a system with very few interruptions -- one where we choose what to do, and when to do it, and where we trust ourselves to actually do that -- then I think peace and harmony will prevail.

P1: Catastrophic if not done

The highest priority task is that which results in catastrophe if not done.

When next door was on holiday, I fed their cat twice a day. If I don't feed the cat, it dies.

When I put bread in the oven, if I don't take it out approximately 25 minutes later, a day's effort is wasted, the house fills with acrid smoke, and in the worst case it sets on fire.

If you don't buy tickets within an hour of them going on sale, they sell out.

There's a subtle subclass of P1 tasks that might be useful:

1. Completion-catastrophic: the cat needs to be fed twice a day but it isn't really critical when. Morning and evening will do.
2. Time-catastrophic: the bread really does have to come out in 25 minutes.

I believe that this class of tasks SHOULD exist in their own task system. We naturally do this anyway: we set a timer on our phone or we ask our home assistant to 'remind me in 20 minutes'. We write something on a sticky note and leave it in a prominent place.

We'd never trust these things to our main task system because we know they'd get lost there.

Also I think having a separate place for these items really drives home their importance. When you see a notification from that app, you know it's time to stop messing around. When your phone alarm goes off and it says 'take bread out of oven' you never dismiss it and keep doing what you were doing. You know it needs to be done now.# Scheduled things

Orthogonal to this -- I'll draw this up as a diagram later -- are things that are scheduled.

It should go without saying that something that is scheduled -- a meeting, an appointment -- must happen at that time.

Here I consider a 'scheduled' task to involve someone else who isn't you. They often require you to be somewhere, even if that somewhere is virtual, e.g. a Zoom meeting.

You'd be an ass if you just didn't turn up to stuff when you said you would.

Scheduling your own time is a separate thing which we will discuss later.These thoughs form the basis of how we'll be re-structuring Lucy's life in the workshop. There'll be more on this topic in future posts.

I'd love your feedback. This forum post is probably the best place.