Inside Out

Notes on seeking wisdom and crafting software

Back to todo lists

Post an unproductive week and some moments of retrospection later; the root cause of my state of non-action seemed to be lack of clarity and focus. Every day this week, I had bunch of ideas related to the on going projects. Somewhere during this cycle of dealing with tasks, I got overwhelmed with the chained "task" reaction, and lost the focus to organize/think through.

**Looking back...**

I needed to get into the System again, let the System worry about ideas/projects/tasks. And then my goal should as simple as knocking the tasks off, one by one. My previous attempts to hack on a System were only moderately successful (apart from the few months when I hosted Tracks on my domain). Two lessons from the past -

- Go for the most minimalist yet tweakable user interface. You must know where *what is* - Carefully choose the system (GTD et. al), or the system would get too complex, and ultimately take me down with it :)

**Made the jump**

Remember the Milk, it is. The biggest other online contender was Toodledo with great many features (per [this](http://www.toodledo.com/info/compare.php) comparison chart). I do care a lot about how and where my data goes (read encrypted), todoist only provides SSL with premium accounts. No go. Plus with RTM, I loved their usability and the amazing community around. If you haven't done already, check out their [Tips and Tricks](http://blog.rememberthemilk.com/category/tips-tricks/) blog posts. So far so good :)

Next, choosing a system. I started with Zen To Done (loved the [principles](http://zenhabits.net/zen-to-done-ztd-the-ultimate-simple-productivity-system/)), thanks to *ssimon* for [this](https://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/tips/13499/) nice writeup on implementing ZTD with RTM.

**Tweak it up**

Here are the RTM mods I'm using:

- User style: [Remember the Milk - Keyboard Shortcuts (Smart Add)](http://userstyles.org/styles/20797/remember-the-milk-keyboard-shortcuts-smart-add) - User style: [RTM on top -chrome](http://userstyles.org/styles/46647/rtm-on-top-chrome) (with some modifications, available [here](https://gist.github.com/1287359))

And this is how the interface looks currently.

[![58](http://arun.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/58-scaled1000.jpg?w=300)](http://arun.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/58-scaled1000.jpg)