the joy of task lists

Last summer I wrote about todo'ing better, where I was moving away from cramming everything into structured lists with the app "2Do" and adding in "Tot". "Tot" is a simplistic text editor app that syncs really well across devices, but purposefully offers 7 spaces to work in. (FWIW, "SimpleNote" is still another well-syncing cross-platform app for text, and I use it for my "big pile of unsorted text notes" and have given up worrying about its junk pile aspect.)

Anyway, yesterday I was having problems feeling motivated, and I realized some of it was not getting enough reward for getting tasks done. The potential list of projects I COULD do is practically unlimited, so some days the only reward for getting the more critical or useful stuff done is the feeling of "but I still have more to do." 

The simple life hack was to allow myself an indulgent "DONE" list. Items can be simply cut from the main TODO section and pasted under the list of accomplishments. (Later I even brought it into my diary entry for the day.) Sometimes, when the prospect of "Todo Zero" seems incredibly distant and maybe even self-defeating, it's just nice to have a reviewable list of what I did manage to get through.

Of course options for Todo Lists has long been an interest of mine. One DOS-era program I've always been conceptually fascinated by (though not enough to figure out how to get it up and running on modern equipment) is Lotus Agenda:

It has its own cult following - especially for its clever auto-tagging. Definitely impressive pseudo-AI, reminds me a little bit of how amazed I've always been at Zork's Command Parser's ability to understand fairly complex sentences ("throw rock at the green dragon" vs the Verb-Noun THROW ROCK style parsers that were more common.)

Anyway, despite me posting about this a year ago, having forgotten and so having to research the name - I forgot again and wasn't even able to find the previous entry, so here are buzzwords: organizer, MS-DOS, todo, Leonard, free-form.