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TODOs at home and at work
Mar. 9th, 2023 08:19 amIt's funny... at home I have 180 emails in my inbox, dating back to 2017 (but there are actually more unread, auto-archived from before that). The vast majority are from 2020 and 2022, curiously enough. And I have an ever-growing todo list. But at work I maintain Inbox Zero, or at least Inbox Rarely More Than Two, and there are extremely few tasks that linger.
I suppose the difference is in several parts:
- A number of the home emails are essentially tasks; at work, I would shove these into an issue tracker (and in some cases reply to the sender with a link to the issue I filed). I don't have a good "ticket tracker" at home.
- A lot of the home emails are "here's an interesting thing". Maybe I read the thing, maybe I don't. There's ambiguity: Is this something I should treat like I would on social media, where I at most leave a fave/upvote/heart/star and move on, or is it more like a conversation, where the person is expecting a response? When I have ambiguous work I have a very strong tendency to procrastinate, and so it sits there.
- In the case of my todo list... I don't have a manager at home! My boss is me. There's no undercurrent of "what if I don't perform well", so I don't have as much external motivation to get stuff done.
I'm curious in particular whether other people have found good solutions to the "I'm using my inbox as a todo list, badly" problem. Are there applications you use? Strategies?
I suppose the difference is in several parts:
- A number of the home emails are essentially tasks; at work, I would shove these into an issue tracker (and in some cases reply to the sender with a link to the issue I filed). I don't have a good "ticket tracker" at home.
- A lot of the home emails are "here's an interesting thing". Maybe I read the thing, maybe I don't. There's ambiguity: Is this something I should treat like I would on social media, where I at most leave a fave/upvote/heart/star and move on, or is it more like a conversation, where the person is expecting a response? When I have ambiguous work I have a very strong tendency to procrastinate, and so it sits there.
- In the case of my todo list... I don't have a manager at home! My boss is me. There's no undercurrent of "what if I don't perform well", so I don't have as much external motivation to get stuff done.
I'm curious in particular whether other people have found good solutions to the "I'm using my inbox as a todo list, badly" problem. Are there applications you use? Strategies?
