A new Google Tasks and an older Excel/Tasks life goal system

Posted by nathanb
Jul 26, 2018 at 02:17 PM

Dellu wrote:
>I was looking for a more broad approach, where you start out with
>general life goals, and then work your way down to the individual daily
>tasks.
> >I cannot say about his solution. But, I find this description exactly is
>my problem as well with current task managers (GDT in general). These
>tools blindfold me to the “task” level leaving out the big picture. That
>is unfortunate because we can accomplish thousands of tasks that can
>take us nowhere towards our core goals.
>

My struggle as well. It’s like the more engaged you are with a ‘task management’ system, the more granular it gets and the harder it is to keep everything in perspective. It’s like trying to make a map of my forest by cataloging all the tree species and locations, and that just turns into a rabbit hole where I get lost in the details and make no progress on a big map.

Of course there are lots of great tools that help us define those buckets and drill down from goals/responsibilities to projects to tasks. The biggest problem with most of them of course is being limited to one hierarchy. That’s fine if your buckets are arranged by function, but our goals cross those boundaries. So the answer to that is separate columns of metadata for goals and contexts. In every implementation of seen of that, goals just feel arbitrary and optional and take a backseat to granular tasks and we are back to the issue here of top-down vs bottom-up vision and planning.

I’ve been starting to use Ultra Recall more and am beginning to love the functionality of cloning/transclusion. Where an item has a ‘home’ in a hierarchy but can easily ‘appear’ in any other place in a different hierarchy and the item’s info tells you all the places it appears in. This can of course be accomplished via nested tagging (Evernote) or by categorization via different metadata fields. In theory, the two approaches are the same (you are making conscious decisions about additional categories)). Yet the cloning approach ‘feels’ better to me since I can simply dump a new item into the ‘main’ hierarchy without NEEDING to pick from all the right category columns to have ‘fully entered’ the new item in the system. I think this feels better because all my category edges are in constant question. Tag, context, project, and goal fields can be overlapping lists but the ‘system’ needs you to be consistent with ensuring they AREN’T overlapping lists or they will make the whole picture muddier, not more clear. That’s added mental overhead. Obviously, cloning an item under a different parent in another hierarchy is the exact same mental work as defining item attributes. The difference is that another branch in another tree is ‘just another list’. I don’t need to decide if ‘exercise more’ is a task or a project or a goal or a weekly focus item. It’s just a thought, and I can put it at the highest level of my hierarchies to imply it’s important right now, I can nest it under a ‘monthly initiatives/weekly review’ tree, ‘be a better husband’ tree, ‘think about’ tree, whatever.

I miss just making simple-ish lists, but I HATE information islands where you have to drill down to that node/list in that tree to ‘find’ that item who only appears there as an orphaned copy. Cloning/transclusion makes me feel like I can maintain a ‘complete’ bucket where all thoughts have an anchor in the system but they can make appearances in any arbitrary lists I want without the friction of constant metadata judgement calls.

Now my problem is that I want to manage ALL my info via cloning (files, tasks, projects etc) but the only software I’m aware of that does cloning (Ultra Recall, MyInfo, InfoQube, MyBase etc) are all chained to the desktop. Does a mobile/pc sync exist for a cloning solution. I imagine maybe DevonThink…unfortunately I’m among the 2.5 people on this forum NOT in the Apple ecosystem. ;-)