A Day of Work with Swipes
2015-07-10
So I was asked what my routine was? Well I wanted to write this post for a good while now, so here it is.
I am one of the people who consider to do lists harmful. So I start my day thinking about the pig picture things I want to do today. Commonly I do this over a cup of espresso and today I want to clean up the house, since Friday is may "day off" from my day job and continue working on fedz.me, specificity I want to finish porting it to angular.js.
At this point I look into Swipes. This morning the list looked like this:
I sort and schedule the tasks. Basically the tasks come in 3 ways, things I intend to do immediate, things I want to do "later today" and things I want to do "tomorrow". (Occasionally I also push them off to "next weekend" or "next week".)
Tomorrow
A mystical land where 99% of all human productivity, motivation and achievement is stored.
Today the list remained with only two items, with a further 2 waiting in "later today". Also what's not on the list are minor tasks from "cleaning up house", anything about my work on fedz.me and the fact that I need to make a pizza dough, because my daughter comes in for lunch and I promised pizza.
This approach of fist looking at the big picture and then extract actionable tasks comes from the time I rigorously made a productivity plan each morning. This is something I learned from a jumping jack on coffee, that desperately tries to appear "professional" and fails at it.
So after cleaning the house and Pizza, my list looks like such:
After an other espresso I fire up my text editor and command line and start hacking away at fedz.me. Normally I would also track my progress with Pivotal Tracker, like in my review I wrote a while ago. But fedz.me it to much of a prototype to profit from project management.
At the end of the day, I have not checked my IAM policies and getting black ink is a task for "tomorrow".
Like I wrote in my review of swipes, I keep all the little loose ends in Swipes, not the big things and I don't use it for project management. In addition I have a strict policy of deleting any task that I reschedule to often.
The reason why Swipes is awesome, is that it hides all the tasks you don't want to do today anyway and thus you don't get guilt ridden by your to do list. This makes Swipes compatible with my aversion of to do lists.
A final mention of awesomeness:
You can define what "weekend" means. This is awesome, because for me weekend means Friday, since I send Monday to Thursday working for my day job at Siemens. (I don't and can't use Swipes at Siemens.)