PTPL 072 · I Love Keeping All My Projects and Tasks in a Single, Searchable File

PLUS The most important piece of tool-related productivity advice you’ll ever hear

Plain text, Paper, Less (PTPL) Productivity Digest, text-based image by Author

Welcome! I’m Ellane, and this is a once-a-week summary of things that are helping me to simplify and future-proof my digital-analog workflow.

Essential tool-related productivity advice: YOU are the key

The following quote is about plain text, but it can apply to any tool. Read it through, then read it again — this time replacing “plain text” with Tana, Capacities, Scrintal, RemNote, Napkin, Omnifocus, Things, ToDoist, TickTick, or whichever tool is currently trying to catch your eye.

Plain text isn’t a magic bullet to cure your productivity woes.

…If you don’t have that focus or discipline or work ethic, or if you don’t develop it, plain text isn’t going to help you. You’ll wind up like so many people who adopt whatever tool or system is hot at the moment. The tool or system they expect will solve all of their productivity problems. Like them, you’ll wind up abandoning plain text in frustration (maybe even disgust) after the gains you expected don’t materialize.

The tool you use isn’t the most important piece of the puzzle. You are. Once you have your focus, once you’ve built up the discipline, plain text can definitely help you get your work done.

— Scott Nesbitt

Task management in a PKM / FKM system: failure led to success

I recently spent a very intense day exploring all the ways I could record tasks as they came up that would give me a more streamlined, simplified project and task management system.

Conclusion: the way I’m doing things doesn’t need to change. I’ve made a few tweaks to the way I name my tasks to make it easier to process my inbox, but on the whole it is still a single TaskPaper syntax file, with linked project pages for keeping track of the details. (Goal: write this up in detail)

Oddly enough, I found this result disappointing! I really thought I would find a way to throw all tasks into a big bucket as they occurred to me, and use saved searches to see subsets as needed. After all, this is the way my DIY Flashcards work, and it’s also the foundation on which plain text accounting is built.

These were the advantages I envisaged from separating tasks into individual files:

• Speed of capturing tasks (no need to sort under headings in a linear list)
• Wide range of sorting options, accessible via the convenience of saved searches
• A system that followed unified principles, across multiple applications of said principles

Why, then, was the one-file-per-task experiment a failure?

1. It felt like I’d added complexity to something that was begging for simplicity
2. Moving tasks up and down the list of priorities for a project became harder to do
3. Each task needed strict metadata that had to be consistent, or tasks wouldn’t show up in searches
4. I kept thinking there was a task missing from the search results because of inaccurate metadata, leading to distraction and a lack of trust in the system

And so I am convinced the all-tasks-in-one-file method is the best approach for my current needs.

A single file for all projects and tasks gives me:

• A fast way to enter tasks (sorting under headings in a linear list looks pretty, but is optional)
• A bird’s eye view of everything I’ve got going on
• Quick access to subsets of tasks, according to urgency, effort needed, people involved, and more

Remember, your needs might be very different to mine. Perhaps a single file per task, or a purpose-built app will suit you very well, in which case that is what you should use.

The ideal system will be tailored to fit your brain and your needs.

Be careful not to try and force your broad shoulders into someone else’s petite fitted jacket, but be equally sure your slim hips are being shown to their best advantage in their own tailored threads — not someone else’s voluminous, multi-pocketed cargo pants.

See also PTPL 050 - More on the Supremely Awesome TaskPaper Syntax in Obsidian

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