Yearly Theme (2023) - Completions

A basis for last years (2023) theme initially came from planning to complete my uni course in 2023 but it worked out well as a nice follow up to the previous years too: healthy habits and focus.

The Year of Completions would act both as a focus in trying to complete more of what I started but also to work as a de-cluttering of life, projects and things I’d like to do but haven’t yet. Hopefully having a more focused list of things to do would lead to more things added spontaneously and completed, rather than not doing things because I haven’t finished something else.

Further to this, I hoped that a higher completion rate for tasks and projects would lend to feeling overwhelmed less.

The two main things that I wanted to make a part of this years theme is a way to track task progress and completion, and the use of a daily to-do list.

Creating a Daily Todo

Something that I should have had years ago is a daily to-do list. I had no way to keep track everything that I thought of or had to remember, either for work or personal things. Even in many of the Cortex episodes, both Grey and Myke talk about the importance of tracking tasks and I still hadn’t sorted something out for myself.

Reducing the number of things listed in my head alone would help with the goal of reducing the feeling of overwhelmed. Using Obsidian’s Rollover Daily Todos plugin’s I was be able to list, track and rollover over uncompleted ones to the ext day.

Initially I considered using the daily to-do for recurring things within the day but I didn’t do this in the end as that seemed like a lot more tracking than I was wanting to do at the time and the guide that I established in last years theme covered most of that.

Task Tracking

From the start of the year I tested and trialled a few different task tracking software applications and services, but didn’t find something that really worked in well with what I wanted. I tried using the Obsidian Tasks plugin, but that really didn’t work well for me. I wanted to have task tracking separate to my PKM and to-do list, even those two combined seemed a little clunky to me.

So, in the end, with the improved tracking of tasks that I had to complete (via the to-do list) I felt comfortable that this part was covered off enough, at least for this year.

Review

The daily to-do was a big success and, even though I didn’t use it every day, it helped to give me some peace of mind that I wasn’t forgetting things. One particularly good use was for just jotting down something quickly to follow up on at a later date: videos referenced, articles to re-read, shopping things I needed, etc.

Throughout the year I felt more and more productive (this was partially due to a role change too) and I think that I would have struggled a lot more if it wasn’t for a more consistent use of a to-do list.

I ended up separating my work task list into a separate Obsidian vault as I wanted to keep some gaps between the two to-do lists, otherwise during my free time I’d end up seeing a bunch of work things that had to be done.

I did find that my personal to-do completion rate dropped a bit, especially when it came to household/chore-type tasks. The work from the year of healthy habits definitely needs to be reinstated a bit!

For some final thoughts on the year:

  • I finished uni (hopefully for the last time!)
  • I was more productive at work than I ever remember in the past
  • I was more organised at work (not well organised, just better than before!)
  • I was better at planning out work (both professional and personal) that had to be done