sesquipedalian2's comments

sesquipedalian2 | 3 years ago | on: GSuite legacy users can now get a free personal account, includes Gmail

I closed my GSuite account and migrated to Fastmail when the free tier shutdown was first announced. I’m glad I did. Fastmail does several things better than GSuite/GMail. It has a very nice UI. I was expecting a UI downgrade, but was pleasantly surprised.

Also, migrating (including setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) was fast and easy.

The $50/year price difference is well worth it. I’m sharing this because I wouldn’t have switched on my own. But I should have migrated even before Google’s changes were announced. The competition has surpassed Google’s offering.

sesquipedalian2 | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do you manage – and remember to manage – your to-do list in 2022?

TickTick is the best app I've found. I started with Todoist. But bugs and missing features made be check out the competition a few years back. I've been happy with the switch to TickTick, and I haven't had any reason to re-shop since.

TickTick has steadily improved/refined their offering without ever interrupting my existing workflows.

Thoughts/details about how I use it:

(1) I never try to remember to do anything. I just always add a quick reminder in TickTick and let my brain move on. I have ~300 reminders right now. This is part of the answer to how I remember to manage the list. The list has every I need to know/track in it, so the need for management shows up whenever the list becomes unwieldy. More on that below.

(2) Everything that needs to get done gets a due date. I add an arbitrary one if it doesn't have to get done by a certain date. I won't see any task with a due date again until the due date arrives. The only thing I regularly pay attention to is my "Today" view -- the list of due or overdue tasks.

(3) Actually-scheduled things go on my calendar. The to-do list is for things that don't necessarily have to get done at a fixed time. (Tick Tick is good about showing both your calendar and your tasks at the same time, so you can maintain this separation while still seeing what has to get done.)

(4) There are lots of tasks (e.g. perform annual maintenance) that I don't perform right away. Having these tasks automatically repeat 1 year from completion (vs. 1 year from the original due date) is a very helpful/useful option. (Both Todoist and TickTick support this.)

(5) I remind myself to do more things than I actually do. As tasks come up that I'm not going to perform right away, I re-schedule them (e.g. for 1 more week out). But once I've dismissed/delayed a task a few times, it's time to re-evaluate whether it's actually worth doing.

It's always interesting to notice thoughts like: "I should do this, but I'm about to skip doing so again." Sometimes this prompts working to develop new habits or other corrective action. But more often it results in me re-evaluating why I think I "should" do it and deleting the task. Until I take one of those actions, I have explicit evidence that my thoughts (what I should do) and actions (what I'm actually doing) aren't quite aligned. Seeing that gap is useful -- it provides some insights.

(6) The biggest downside of this system is that it can result in a mountain of delayed (so clearly not very important) tasks building up. But I find it better to deal with that as described in (5) than to be careful about what I add to my task list up front.