March 26, 2019

2019.03.26
Notes to my future self about my Todo list (which may interest exactly no one else, though I'm always a bit interested in how other people keep track of their stuff):


Still using "2Do" for iOS, but things were getting clogged up and stressful. The app was one of the first I'd seen with sterling support for category sublists where you could still see all tasks on a single big scrollable panel (without clicking), but with clear UI for good (but optional) date-specific and repeating reminder support.


Prior to this, I had the first category of "Importantish" and then a series of sorted categories, ("Porchfest", "Home", "Work", "Waiting", "Online", "Band", "Store", "Someday", with "Someday" being the "Someday, Maybe" lower-priority GTD recommends)


An early mistake was putting everything in "Importanish" until it got sorted. Adding an explicit default "Sort-Me" category as second on the list (a while back) made that better -saying it was "important" to sort everything was false, and diluting the urgency of the "Importantish" pool.


The most important recent mental change is saying everything "Sort-Me" is more just "normal priority", and all the categories under it are decreased priority - they were usually "under the fold" anyway.


I added a new "Google this" category after noticing "Sort-Me" was getting clogged with a bunch of potentially quick "someone mentioned this, go see if it's interesting" items... but I think in general, I will be deleting several of the other categories, the aspect of "where am I when I can do this" (like "Home") is less important than the relative implied priority.


I also got rid of a lot of "daily nags"... some are useful (especially tasks that accumulate if I skip a day) but in general they were just clogging the system.


Finally, my one complaint about 2Do was that I never did figure out how to get its icon "badge" count to be quite what I wanted, and the number was just cranking up my ambient stress level without really getting me to do anything, so I removed that badge, and also the badge for gmail, even though I'm trying to be vigilant about keeping my "Important and Unread" to zero (Gmail's "Important" guess automation is really pretty decent.)

(Overall 2Do is pretty grand -- yeah, it suffers from that "more features than you actually want" (since they say everyone uses a small percentage of the features of complex programs, but often not the same things within that percentage) but still manages to make a decent UI that doesn't get overwhelming.)


TIL Rihanna's Umbrella is built from GarageBand's royalty-free "Vintage Funk Kit 03" drum loop.

I really want to work up my composing-for-street-bands mojo. I just ordered a book a elementary school music teacher recommended - it might be a bit too basic. I'm wondering if I should look for some kind of private lessons, or just buckle down and do it. (Basically, I know bass lines, and have some idea of an existing melody, but have little idea of what to tell other parts to do that aren't basic chords...)