Three things, somehow related

Posted on Jul 2, 2019
  1. Yesterday I googled “bullet journal too many tasks” and this came through like a laser: The Monthly Log - Where Tasks Go To Die

    I try to review my monthly log every day or two, but when I scan the list I mutter a “meh”, and don’t end up doing anything off of it. I think it may be because there’s almost always more days in the month to get around to them. Sometimes I’ll accidentally accomplish a task, but I never proactively do tasks on it. It has become the list where tasks go to die.

    How do you make sure things on your monthly log get done?

  2. I’ve just about finished all the episodes of the Ephemeral podcast. Lots of old, lost, weird, forgotten things, brought back into daylight by a caring host.

  3. A colleague came to speak to our department about continuous improvement today. A few times a year, I get the religion on continuous improvement all over again, and then it goes away, and then it comes back later. Most of the time, my brain is thinking, “here are a crap-ton of tasks, I should knock some of them out and things will be better”. Less often, but probably better, would be to think “how can I get better at not accumulating so many tasks, and/or actually doing them?”

So here I am thinking: Are all these crazy systems I haphazardly maintain actually helping things? (Bullet journal, text files of weird stuff, Things 3, YNAB, wiki, blog, email, etc.) Is it all sustainable? Aren’t I just treading water anyway? When do I make time to do stuff vs. just refactor stuff? And when is the actual learning about history and problems/solutions that have a longer arc than my ephemeral collections?

The question: Am I getting better at life, or not?