Scrying todo lists

I have recently had a lot of stuff going on. Work is busy, life is busy,¹ and I have been spread thin. I have had some success on two of my major projects, and one of my side projects, meaning they all need some attention to keep the ball rolling. A collaborator sent me two drafts for projects from time gone by, and we had an undergraduate student join the group for a three week semester-break research project. On top of all of that, I went to Adelaide for the ANFF-SA microengineering winter school.²

My usually structured days were gone, and I started having to regularly triage my todo list to make sure the urgent and important were completed, and the important tasks were given time as and when possible.³ At times, it felt like nothing I had originally planned to do ended up done, and my todo list grew ever longer.

I have started listening to a new podcast, Cortex, and came across an interesting idea: scrying your list.

In the episode, Grey mentions that “it is not realistic, and not ambitious, to complete everything on your todo list, it is the order that is important”.

The idea, as I understand it, is that a todo list should be infinite. The action items managed and manageable, but ambitious. Add everything you might want to do, externalise your abilities and ideas, and then ruthlessly manage the list and decide on what to execute. Only do what is relevant in the moment, or on that day, or week, or quarter, or year (depending on what level you’re looking at).

There is the same idea expressed in another blog: plaintext-productivity. Basically, the effective use of todotxt relies on regularly changing the priority of tasks. As the author says “I keep the list sorted by priority, and I change task priorities all the time. This is key to maintaining flexibility while working.” In other words, scry your todo list.

I have found it an extremely useful way to triage tasks, lightening the mental load and allowing me to focus on the urgent and important without losing sight of the rest.