Now that everything is safely captured in Todoist and Evernote, what do I do? It’s time for the organize step – sorting through everything you captured and getting the important things into your agenda – Google Calendar in my case.
I do this during a weekly review, usually on Friday (at work) or Saturday (at home). I am quite strict with not doing personal projects at work and not working during the weekend, but the weekly review – which covers both types of projects – is something I can’t get around. Since my inboxes (Todoist and Evernote) are combined, it’s not logical to go through the process I describe below twice.
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Evernote Inbox Zero
The first thing I do is sort through everything in the Evernote inbox, where all notes were captured. The whole structure of my notebooks looks roughly like this:
Inbox – notebook where everything goes by default and which will get emptied out in this section
Ideas – “maybe/later” notebook
Work – notebook stack
Blog – notebook stack
Personal – notebook stack
Snooze – notebook stack
A few of my Evernote notebooks. I use numbers and dots to make sure the notebooks are sorted the way I want.
In Work, I have notebooks for papers and classes I’m teaching (current projects), but also a reference notebook with checklists and templates.
The other two are reference notebooks, where I drag and drop other notes to, and which I review if I’m searching for something.
In Personal, I have a “Mean plan” notebook and notebooks for different types of recipes, with drag-and-drop in between.
The Snooze stack if for notebooks that I don’t use very often.
For example long-term projects, such as assembling a portfolio for my teaching qualification. This is something I need to pay attention to, but not every week. I also have a true Reference notebook, with things like manuals for appliances.
Ideas notebook
All other notes (“maybe”) go into the giant Ideas notebook.
A recent revelation was that I shouldn’t use only topics (academia, health, AI) but also the type of note (article, Twitter thread, website) and what I would use it for (advice to share on Twitter, example to use as inspiration). I fail to do this consistently, but I try not to think about it too much, and use too many tags rather than too few. Over time, patterns in which tags I’m using more are starting to emerge, so I can merge and delete tags as needed.
What this accomplishes is that the things I might want to, but don’t have to do, are out of sight in the Ideas notebook, and I can focus my attention on current projects. But these ideas are not lost forever! For example, if for a blog post I’m looking for content to include, I will search through the Ideas notebook, and process the relevant notes, which I will afterwards move to “Blog: shared content”.
But, I have also decided I have already spent too much time on this, which is not productive. The idea is to use this structure, and update it as I go.
Note: IMPORTANT
Todoist Inbox Zero
Next I move on to the Todoist inbox. Here the structure looks like this:
Inbox
Incubator (Work and Personal)
Current (Work and Personal)
Snooze (Work and Personal)
The inbox is a single task list, and all others have task lists related to different projects. Since I tried to capture only actions that fit into my projects, achieving inbox zero should be simple. For each todo, I first review whether that is indeed the case, and if not, the todo goes to Evernote. For all remaining todos, I do the following:
Use an action verb if it doesn’t already have one (to be a better collaborator to my future self)
Move it to a project in Incubator, Current or Snooze
Add an (approximate) date
(Optional) Add labels
Next 7 days
Now I look at what Todoist has scheduled for me in the next 7 days. I use this to decide what really needs to be done next week, and what I could postpone. The meetings I already have in Google Calendar, also influence this. I don’t want to divide my attention between too many different projects, so identify clusters / projects of focus for next week, and postpone other todos.
In Todoist, for the projects of focus (usually Current – Work projects), I go through their individual task lists and break up the tasks that I want to work on into smaller, actionable tasks. I then give these smaller tasks a specific day and hour. I usually schedule high energy tasks like writing in the morning, and everything else in the afternoon.
With the recent two-way integration between Todoist and Google Calendar these tasks now appear as 1-hour events on my calendar. Now I can change the length of the tasks, drag and drop the tasks between days, etc, as I would with calendar events. Tasks which only have a day, but not an hour in Todoist, appear as all-day events in Google Calendar. I try to convert these into scheduled-by-hour tasks as much as possible, as this helps me to get a better overview of how much time I spend and how many things I actually work on.