Project/Task/Time Management Strategies for Creative and Technical People: Help Required!

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Hi all,

Hope you’re having a fantastic week. I am reaching out to anyone who has knowledge/experience in the field of Project, Task and Time Management and can provide the assistance. I feel the people who inhabit this forum are probably very similar to me and might have the same struggles.

I struggle massively with journaling, note taking and task management in general. And have done for a long time. I’ve tried many tools and methods and none have helped. Not having the right tools and a good process means I can feel disorganized and then that leads to stress feeling overwhelmed. But it also lately makes for frustrated because I don’t feel like I’m actually achieving anything.

I am lucky in a way, my job and hobbies overlap - if I wasn’t getting paid for it, I’d still be doing it! But this means that the line between work and fun is blurry, or non existent. I will take projects that start at home to work as demos and proof-of-concepts. And similarly work will often trigger a new project (and they will cycle). On top of that I have private projects - home brewing, cooking, training … but being the people we are we find a way to add tech to that as well, and so everything is a big mess of interconnected work!

I also just find a lot of things interesting and the Information Age is a curse here - constantly being recommended a topic on YouTube or a hackaday article - things that aren’t in my “must do” tasks… but more “I’ve wondered about that…” and you suddenly have 60 open tabs and 500 “watch later” videos. You find you’ve spent 5 years planning and researching a project instead of doing it… and in that time you’ve researched the same open question 5 times because you didn’t remember you’ve already researched it and have lost the notes you made! When you work on something for a while, and get to a point where it’s “completed for now” and a year later you want to fork the design, add a new feature … or you put a project on hold whilst you go on vacation and when you come back you’ve got no idea what status you were at! … or ideas that just percolate from time to time… pop up for 5 minutes then disappear until someone or something promotes it to a project to be done but now you have to collect and find all the old research (happened to me today!)

So I am 100% confident there are people here who will be reading this and nodding… so how do you solve it?! What tools and methods do you use?

I have been using Evernote primarily - not because it’s great… but in my experience it’s the least bad! The Mac application is fuss free and puts all the focus on the notes. Text goes edge to edge and the line spacing is pretty good. It’s not “fancy” in the UI to look pretty - it’s functional instead (this is why I don’t use notion or bear for example). It supports pasting screen shots and images. I can insert docs (pdfs, excel) and it embeds YouTube automatically. The iOS App is as capable as I want I to be. It’s buggy though which does p*** me off (especially when it comes to trusting that my notes are as I want them to be, and there is a LOT of stuff I would add) but after trying many other options I keep coming back to Evernote

What I want to do is simple

  1. manage my tasks (what do I have to do) and the sub tasks that go with it
  2. keep notes (I am obsessive on note taking)

the challenge I have found is that

  1. not everything is task based - sometimes you are just reading for interest, for research or what ever → how do you capture that knowledge?
  2. when reading and researching you often have resources (docs, web pages, youtube videos) that are useful - capturing that, and the notes that go with it
  3. in working you often have inspiration for something else, or find questions that aren’t important now, but are interesting
  4. you have a long backlog of things to learn, research, experiment with - again, not tasks, but things that interest you (maybe a backlog)
  5. a “project” or “ideas” book - things you want to do one day; often times you find something accidentally; a resource, article, link etc - you aren’t working on it actively, but you occasionally have things to add to it
  6. when you have a LOT of things going in parallel (which I do, nature of the job) you need to capture knowledge and tasks quickly

I was reading some articles by Arron Lynn, who suggests keeping tasks in one tool (like Asana, OmniFocus etc) maybe because when the article was written Evernote tasks didn’t exist… but Evernote really sucks for task management anyway! his journalling method also agreed with the way I have done things for a long time - I have one note per day in Evernote - this is really quick to capture information and you are never stressing about where to categorize a note (you know, when notes never belong in a single topic, project or task and can easily go in multiple places). This also has the benefit of capturing project progress and chronology - it is painful in that unless you know exactly what to search for, finding things can be painful; also ideas can easily get lost in a note from several weeks ago (so unless you stumble upon it accidentally or remember it, it’s gone); you can easily duplicate work and knowledge; continuing work across multiple days is hard and viewing a full project in one go is impossible…

ive tried having notes per project - but this is not sustainable, and you end up with waaay too many notebooks (due to all the projects). When a note belongs in multiple places, you end up cross referencing or spending way too much time deciding where something goes…

so! if this sounds familiar to you, and you have solved it… please let me know! its driving me nuts…! I am spending too much time trying to be organised than getting stuff done… but not being organised increases the stress levels…

i am working on reducing the things I have in parallel - but that has its limits. For example just now, I have a project but it requires a training course, setting up development environments etc - so before I get to the actual task I have several steps to go through, each of which is “generic” and will be reused in other projects later on… now that can be broken down into tasks I agree

so… having talked to others about this, its not a unique problem so i am confident others have felt or feel my pain and id love some pointers on how to deal with this!

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after listening to the Amp Hour enough … i am sure @ChrisGammell has likely come across this during his time balancing CE, AmpHour, Golioth and every other endeavour he has :slight_smile:

as I sit here now - my current plan is to

  1. move task management into OmniFocus - so at least I have an idea of what I having going on at any one time
  2. go back to my one-note per day in Evernote method, building sections named for the project/task I am working on (which maps to OmniFocus if there is a project/task)
  3. tag each note in evernote with the customer/project that I am working on - this way I can also filter notes based on customer/project to get just the notes where i worked on things (and accept that it wont be a single view)
  4. if the note has a “good idea” then I will tag that line with #idea (or something) and add an actual evernote tag to the note (since Evernote won’t let you do inline tags)
  5. open questions, thoughts, things to investigate will be added as such in OmniFocus
  6. keep a note with ideas - things I want to do one day which I periodically review when i need something to work on
  7. if i do training for a project, break that out as a new “project” with its tasks
  8. in omninote try and collect a “current status” and “next steps” if that helps

it’s not perfect… but maybe it’s the best compromise?

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It’s a struggle.

Over the years I went through many methods for taking notes and tracking projects. I wasn’t really happy with any of them. The problem is that whatever app I found, it required too much fiddling around with the app itself. They all get in the way when all you want is jot things down and later find them. I kept spending way too much time trying to organize stuff, and adding stuff wasn’t always as straightforward as I’d like.

I also learned the hard way that apps and companies disappear. Circus Ponies Notebook, which I used for several years, simply disappeared one day. Evernote changed from a reasonably nice note-taking app into a corporate designed-by-committee jumble of functionality. So, these days whenever I find something that works, I first check if the data is easily exportable in formats that I can work with.

All that said, I eventually settled on an app called Bear for all note-taking. It’s reasonably polished, works on my Mac, phone and ipad, syncs flawlessly, uses Markdown (which I like for quick notes) and most importantly, lets me quickly add screenshots to notes. This is a big thing: adding a scope screenshot should not be a problem, or you won’t do it.

It isn’t perfect, though. It tries to be “smart” about Markdown and doesn’t do a very good job, so if you have lots of code snippets, you end up struggling and fighting the app. And I still haven’t figured out an organizational system that makes sense, so I’m just writing notes, tagging them and hoping the search will help with the rest.

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Circus Ponies’ abandonment was very painful indeed; it was a great app and I had years of notes in it. Since then I’ve tried countless “organizers” but they all try to do way too much - all I want is an outliner that can handle pictures. I finally settled on Omni Outliner which is OK, but all Omni’s love seems to go to Omni Focus, and Outliner is missing modern features like pinch zoom (or any kind of zoom) for images. There’s an app called “Outline” or similar that looks great, but it can’t import any format that Omni Outliner can export, including HTML and OPML, which is nuts. I’ll give Bear a closer look, thanks.

The problem of “apps and companies disappearing” is largely Apple’s fault. Every few years they change the OS, rendering apps incompatible, and small developers like Circus Ponies, faced with mammoth rewrites, throw in the towel. I have Windows apps from prehistoric times that still work under Win 11.

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This is my starting point for any note taking app these days as well. Evernote broke my darn heart and I won’t let my data get captured by a proprietary format again. I use Joplin currently, but Obsidian and Bear are similar in that way.

I have tried this at one point, but I ended up switching to a single note per project, per month, and calling it a “work log”, where I track items in a bulleted list. The top bullet is the current date. It works ok.

Separate from the note app, I used Manic Time to track activity and time spent in different programs on my computer and phone. That helped as a backstop when I didn’t write something down.

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For what it’s worth, I still use Asana for task tracking, and it works well enough for Joulescope. While Asana can hold persistent notes and files for projects, I tend to still use independent documents. I think of Asana as transient data that disappears when the tasks and projects complete.

Anything that needs to persist, like architecture and design information, goes into markdown or MS Word documents on the file system. We make one folder per project with a README.md, “doc” subdirectory and whatever else is needed. Each project folder is also a git repo. For larger files not suitable for git, I have a separate top-level directory that mirrors the file structure of the repo project directory that gets synchronized across computers using Syncthing. This works for individuals and small teams, but likely does not scale well to larger teams or projects split between multiple teams.

Note that you can have a project of future_ideas. As you get more serious about an idea, you split it out into its own project. I also have a “wiki” project of markdown files for things that don’t fit anywhere else.

I use Toggl for time tracking. I do not tie time tracking to Asana tasks.

At the beginning of the year, I switched from paper notebooks to digital notes using GoodNotes and an iPad with Apple Pencil 2. I love it, especially the ability to easily insert a photo of something for quick informal documentation. I am just not comfortable using a keyboard for daily notetaking. Yes, I can type faster than I write, with writing you can easily organize things. GoodNotes also allows you to edit and rearrange, which is even more flexible than paper. I view notebooks as chronological, detailed notes that you rarely go back to and mostly exist to structure thoughts and solve problems. Task-related notes also go to Asana and more formal information also goes into MS Word documents.

I wouldn’t worry too much about finding the “perfect” solution, as “perfect” varies by project and team size. Sometimes the structure will work better, while sometimes you might need multiple subprojects for a single project. Get to good enough as the goal is to create great things!

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I feel like Notion.so is worth mentioning. I like the way you can reformat the blocks and store small amounts of data. It certainly breaks on too much data. Their AI features are increasingly useful too. Looking forward to what they add there.

Also something to be said for a good old fashioned Moleskine soft cover classic notebook and a nice pen.

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I found that many note taking utilities (even just jotting down on paper) are write-only, and their main purpose is to help you commit to memory the parts that are interesting. How often do you really re-read them?

Going back to the main problem of having too much going on and being fragmented. Since starting regular mediation, insisting on 8+ hours of regular sleep and an hour or two of sports activiites early every day, I am finding it much easier to separate the wheat from the chaff and have a better sense of priorities. The same holds for regular tech free retreats.
Focusing is easier from a distance :slight_smile:

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While that is true, there is another factor, I think — and that is our collective unwillingness to pay a premium subscription price for apps that we use. Here goes a tangential rant:

Whenever a developer switches from a one-time fee to a subscription, there is an uproar, with many people declaring they will never subscribe, because they want to “own” the app. “Owning” was possible in the 80s and 90s, but since then it’s been a fictional term. The software world evolves too quickly, and all apps need continued maintenance and updates. Software authors tried to work around that problem by inventing “major updates” that require payment — more fiction, because this is effectively a subscription in disguise.

These days, when I find a new interesting app, I check the business model, and if I see a one-time payment, I’m worried. Also, I happily pay for subscriptions to the few apps that I actually use, hoping that the resulting business model is sustainable in the long term. I would rather use fewer apps, but have them be well-maintained and sustainable.

To keep this mildly on-topic, since I’ve heard Asana mentioned, I’ll mention Linear (https://linear.app) — it’s mostly designed for software teams, but because it is incredibly well executed, it works for many other use cases as well. It is the best web app I’ve ever seen, and I wish I had the money to make my own web app this good.

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Unfortunately, I found that with the increasing number of things that I do, and with my increasing age, I tend to rely on my notes more and more. My projects are often fragmented in time, with several-month pauses, and I often come back to a project and remember absolutely nothing. My notes are the only way for me to keep any kind of continuity and the only thing preventing me from starting from scratch every time I pick up a paused project.

(fully agreed on your other points, though!)

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This, 100%.

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I feel you, it’s a problem, especially when there’s so much fun and interesting projects to do.

I simply use Apple Notes. I know the format is proprietary, but it works fine and syncs across the Apple ecosystem. In the past I’ve tried Evernote and even Notion but I just didn’t fall in love with them as others would have me believe.

On a tangential topic, I do find keeping track of components/items for projects or items that could be used in projects is necessary to maintain sanity, especially in a home lab where you practically are surrounded by this stuff 24/7.

I’ve made my own sort of microSaaS/web app to take care of this. I’ve so far inventoried 800+ components and other things that “might prove useful for my next home automation MCU board project” or stop me from buying another obscure cable that I actually have four of already!

If anyone’s interested to try it out and provide feedback, I’d be happy to share the link for the alpha. It’s early days but I’m planning on adding no frills note taking as well.

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I stumbled my way into OneNote a very long time ago, and have made several attempts to extricate myself to Obsidian and a few other note taking paradigms, but the ability to use it in both personal and work contexts (with corporate software use limitations) with so much fluidity and simple features like Web Clipper and Outlook’s Send-to-Onenote feature have become so ingrained that I keep coming back after short excursions. I currently half-heartedly use Microsoft ToDo to manage work tasks, household tasks and periodic reminders, and have tried to use Asana in my household for collaboration between my wife and I, but nothing has really stuck there.

One of my primary drivers for choosing any tool that is even a sniff away from note-taking, idea management, or project management is ease of screenshot embedding. I’m horrified that so many tools out there in the corporate world just don’t have support for that. Things like Service Now, or Microsoft Planner, or Sharepoint Lists and even Smartsheet miss the boat on top tier support for pasted inline images. Sometimes parts of workflows will have support for inline images being pasted in, but creating a coherent story in the tool of choice needs the proper context of inline pictures and the rest of the tool falls down when it’s not a feature treated as first class citizen.

One part of my stack that’s separate from formal note taking is a good screenshot tool. I’ve settled on ShareX, but there’s lots of choices out there with different tradeoffs. The primary workflow of the screenshot tools is that all screenshots get saved to a synced folder, so even if I’m not in note taking mode, I can quickly screenshot and maybe markup the image knowing that it’ll be there if I need to reference it later. It’s great for things like meetings and presentations where taking formal notes would take me out of listening mode. (and it still just puts it on my clipboard as you’d expect as well)

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I have a very detailed and over-engineered strategy revolving around notion that I think actually doesn’t really solve the problems I HAVE, but rather targets the problems I thought I had.

Databases in notion are super powerful and I have a trifecta set up to manage tasks: “tasks”, “projects, and “clients”, so that all my tasks can be in one spot regardless of which client they’re for (or maybe they’re just for me).

That part is super useful and I love notion databases, though I need to do some pruning of features I’ve built but don’t use.

What doesn’t work is keeping project notes in there. I really need to switch gears and do the “markdown notes alongside the work product” thing both for my own organization and for the use of other potential future project contributors (and the customers).

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I am going to be the cranky contrarian here… but reading through your plea I honestly feel that the solution won’t be found in technology.

High-level:

Adding more technology to a problem that is fundamentally psychological/organizational will only make it worse. Solve the underlying issues that before adding another piece of software/technology/gadget to your life.

This is a similar to the primary theme of the “The Mythical Man-Month”. Adding people/resources to an already late project only extends to the time to completion.

A.)

But this means that the line between work and fun is blurry, or non existent. I will take projects that start at home to work as demos and proof-of-concepts

You are not setting clear / defined boundaries. Software won’t fix this.

B.)

I also just find a lot of things interesting

and get to a point where it’s “completed for now” and a year later you want to fork the design, add a new feature

a “project” or “ideas” book - things you want to do one day; often times you find something accidentally; a resource, article, link etc - you aren’t working on it actively, but you occasionally have things to add to it

you have a long backlog of things to learn, research, experiment with - again, not tasks, but things that interest you (maybe a backlog)

You can’t surf every wave in the ocean.

The problem isn’t that you lack tools to organize, you lack to tools to prioritize. This is not also solved with software.

You will need to let some things go (see C.)

C.)

i am working on reducing the things I have in parallel - but that has its limits.

Actually, no it doesn’t. You have two options

i. Let them go (see E.)

ii. Delegate. If the task/project, etc is that important then figure out how to get help. If it is not important enough to get help, then there is a issue with setting priorities.

If you have so much in your day job you can’t manage, then revisit A.) Set boundaries and learn to say no.

D.)

For example just now, I have a project but it requires a training course, setting up development environments etc - so before I get to the actual task I have several steps to go through, each of which is “generic” and will be reused in other projects later on…

This is called a yak shaving. It is the result of an unclear objective, poorly set priorities and a lack of focus on getting to completion. Then you stacked on an attempt to prematurely optimize for some future, non-existent project that doesn’t have clearly defined requirements and probably never well.

There is a huge fallacy around project reuse. The reality is that once you get to that project, your brain is going to decided what you set up before wasn’t good enough… Then you will be back to shaving the yak.

The solution is to keep reducing scope until you can complete something without a yak shaving.

E.)

(I am obsessive on note taking)

ive tried having notes per project - but this is not sustainable, and you end up with waaay too many notebooks (due to all the projects). When a note belongs in multiple places, you end up cross referencing or spending way too much time deciding where something goes…

add a new feature … or you put a project on hold whilst you go on vacation and when you come back you’ve got no idea what status you were at! … or ideas that just percolate from time to time…
You just stated what the problem is.

and you suddenly have 60 open tabs and 500 “watch later” videos.

Stop treating ideas like gold nuggets that need safely stored / cataloged

Thoughts and ideas are like cattle. At best you heard them and most end up in the slaughterhouse. You only end up with Waygu beef with very selective care and attention.

This behavior is also known as hoarding. Same behavior you see on that show on TV. Except that inside of a house filled with stuff that collapse and kill someone, it is ideas and half completed projects.

Don’t worry, everyone has lots of good thoughts and ideas. That is why they are effectively worthless. Figure out a system to assign priority.

It is 100% possible to solve the problem without software, the cloud or another monthly membership

When I used to teach seminars on DSP, the 1st lesson was
"You don’t need a DSP chip to do DSP. You can do it on paper, with an abacus or with an 8051. Do it slow in the most primitive form 1st, them you will be able to go really fast without needing anything special.

Breaking out of the prison:

1.) Assign a value to your time. Start at $250/hr. Then ask yourself if what you are doing is worth it. Remember, your time is finite and you will die. Ideas/desires are effectively be infinite is size/scope. Your time and energy is not. Trying get more time through efficiency improvements (software) generally doesn’t move the needle much. You will just use these improvments to create more chaos.

2.) Delegate. You can’t do everything. Nor can you learn about everything. If you can’t delegate then you need to aggressively prune.

3.) Set clear boundaries which do not cross. Learn to say no. Both to yourself and others.

4.) Slow down until you can manage your life with 1 notebook. Don’t add other tools until you can.

If you want to go faster, you need to slow down.

Also, this book may be helpful

FWIW. I fight this same battle daily. You are not alone.

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Hi all

thank you so much for all the input! as you can see I posted originally 27 days ago and right after that life hit a wall in a big way and I am only just catching up again :slight_smile:

I am reading everything, but the amount of information here is astounding, and its taking a while to process - but I am so greatful for everything said here… not least as many have said that Im not alone in the battle

what I will say is that after having to take some time out, my notebook is my saviour and when everything else was out of control it has kept everything somewhat in line… I am not reading back my notes from the last few weeks and extracting out to tasks what needs to be done, and what can be left alone

but once again, thank you all for taking the time to reply! hopefully someone else will find this as useful as I have

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This reminds me, I have a semi-active personal wiki that is just a bunch of connected markdown files. On the desktop normally it is edited using the vimwiki plugin, although any similar tool works fine. For a long time, I could to this from mobile using various apps and sharing the wiki folder on Dropbox, for example. On iOS there was an application that worked quite well called Trunk Notes. For several years now, when you start Trunk Notes it warns you that it has been abandoned and the app is not compatible with the current version of iOS. And yet, it still works for me. I’ve always wondered how exactly it is now incompatible.

BTW, when on mobile, I mostly use this as read-only reference. So the ability to update the wiki files may be what’s busted. There have been several other wiki mobile apps that have come and gone, all of which ALMOST work with your preexisting wiki files, if there could only be a tiny tweak in their code. All of them are only written to support making new wikis that are often not easily shared with your desktop.