Every once in a while I feel unsatisfied about how I am managing my projects and tasks. It’s a recurring thing and I know now that perfectionism has some of the blame. Looking back at all my past iterations, I’ve used the Nirvana app the most over the years. I stick with it for a while, then I see something shinier, experiment with the new app, only to go back to Nirvana again.

My last distraction was Microsoft To Do. The company I work for transitioned to Microsoft for everything: emails, files, calendars, chat, meetings, the whole system. I was already familiar with Outlook and OneDrive, but Microsoft To Do was new to me. So I tried it. I can say that I tried it at least 4 times over the last year. Not to mention the times I tried Todoist as well. I believe the sequence was:

• Aug, 2021: First test of MS To Do. I didn’t like it.
• Sep, 2021: I tried Todoist (not for the first time). I got overwhelmed by all the tags/filters options (not the first time this happened…)
• Oct, 2021: Back to MS To Do. Maybe I can make it work? Also, emojis are so cute!
• Jan, 2022: I got back to good old Nirvana. So simple and organized! 😎
• May, 2022: Tried MS To Do again. Can I let go of having the next actions linked to projects? The UI is so beautiful, and tasks can show up alongside Outlook or even inside my calendar. Cool!
• June, 2022: Things got out of control, I was handling a lot of projects at once at work so I went back to Nirvana to gain some clarity. I also noticed I barely used the integrations with Outlook Calendar.
• Sep, 2022: But it would be so cool to have my emails integrated with my tasks! Wouldn’t it? The emojis were cute 🤩 So, back to MS To Do, trying to manage 2 separate accounts (personal and work).
• Oct, 2022: It was too much overhead to have two separate MS To Do accounts, I didn’t know which Inbox to put things in, I constantly neglected one or the other and things started to get off the rails. So back to my trusted tool: Nirvana ⭐.
• Jan, 2023: I read somewhere about new Todoist features coming up and I tried it again. I created a brand new account, got the Premium subscription, and set it up just to feel like it wasn’t for me anymore. In less than 20 days I cancelled my account and asked for a refund. Again, I had too many options to customize it and it became very distracting.
• Feb, 2023: I decided to solve the 2 accounts issue with MS To Do, by using the lists sharing feature between my personal and work accounts. It was okay, but I still thought it was confusing to have 2 inboxes. Also, since in MS To Do we have to use the “Tasks” folder as the Inbox, I noticed this cognitive discomfort of not having an actual “Inbox” there. It may sound like a petty detail, but it really bothers me! Capturing is something I struggle with and having any sort of resistance destroys my ability to get things out of my head.
• Mar, 2023 (aka, Today): I moved back to Nirvana! It just felt like home. I know how it works, things have their specific places, and I trust it more in the end😍.

I decided to write this timeline to try to understand why I was jumping from tool to tool. It became clear that Nirvana was the to-do list manager I used for the longest time because I like it! And so I’m making a decision to continue using it, even though sometimes I miss some colors and emojis.

Looking back I can say that when my life got busy I would always rely on Nirvana to manage all my commitments. It gives me the type of clarity I can’t really find in other tools.

So I’m making a personal commitment to not distract myself again and to stick with Nirvana for at least a year! Focus! 🎯

#GTD #Nirvana #Productivity

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

Yes, I have a confession to make: I went back to Nirvana. Again. After spending time customizing MS To Do, being excited about colorful emojis, backgrounds and all sorts of integrations with Outlook… I went back to the good old Nirvana.

I probably said it before, but Nirvana is still the best GTD implementation for me. It's simple and elegant. I like it because it allows me to have neatly well organized GTD lists. It is the only app that gives me a clear and straightforward view of all my commitments. And you might wonder why is that important?

Well, I worry a lot about things. My mind is constantly thinking, re-thinking and planning. One of the things that attracted me to GTD was the idea of “unloading” my thoughts, stepping back and making sense of them. But all those unloaded things need to be processed, and for my mind to be at ease, they need to be in an organized trusted place. So, Nirvana is the best digital tool to take care of all that stuff.

“You can only feel comfortable about what you're not doing when you know what you're not doing.” — David Allen, Brandon Hall. The Getting Things Done Workbook: 10 Moves to Stress-Free Productivity, 2019.

Maybe it’s because Nirvana has a more fixed structure, things are either in:

• Inbox
• Next
• Later
• Waiting
• Scheduled
• Someday
• Reference

And that’s it. My brain enjoys having these well-defined buckets. And also because Nirvana allows a bird’s eye view of everything, distributed in all those buckets, or views filtered by Personal or Work areas because of the global filters. I have better control of projects states, so if a project becomes inactive, it’s easy to drag and drop it to the “Later” or “Someday” folder and all its next actions will be inactivated as well. No need to go back to the contexts list and move inactivated actions individually (something I would have to go through in MS To Do).

I liked my setup on MS To Do. I think it might work for a lot of people. But there were some details that bothered me:

• NOT having ONE Inbox to rule them all. I was using two accounts, one for personal and one for work, so I ended up with 2 inboxes (that is not an issue if you use one account for everything). The process of having a thought, recognizing it as something to be captured and then having to decide in which instance I was going to capture it created some friction to my capturing. I tend to capture a lot while I’m on my computer, and I would pause to switch accounts and get distracted. I kept remembering how ubiquitous and easy it was to add something to the unified Nirvana Inbox with a keyboard shortcut. And also, how Nirvana syncs between my personal and phone mobiles, so no friction at all.
• Not having the Projects linked to Next Actions. Yeah, I tried to let go of it linking next actions to projects”). And it turns out my preference is to have everything linked. I’ve heard it is a cognitive preference, some people are okay with having things separated, and some people don’t. I’ve tested it for real, so now I know. Linking actions to projects is a must for me.
• The hashtags drop-down selection only appears when adding a new task. So, I was using hashtags to identify projects keywords. When creating a new task in MS To Do I could type “#” and a list of hashtags terms already used would appear. But if I have already captured something and I was processing it to add a hashtag later, the drop-down menu wouldn’t show up and I ended up creating variations of the existing hashtag because I didn’t remember exactly the word I used. It’s a minor detail, but when you start having too many projects, this can be an encumbrance. Of course, this problem is avoidable if you’re not worried about linking next actions to projects, which is NOT my case (see the previous item).

It’s a journey…

I feel comfortable now with my decision. I was triggered to experiment MS To Do because of a change in my work (which recently shifted everything to Microsoft). So I used MS To Do for about a month and realized it was not exactly all that I expected. I still think it’s a great app.

And that’s okay. I know I will change my system based on my experience level, current needs, and changes in the available tools. And Nirvana still works for me, so I’ll stick with it a little bit more!

#GTD #productivity #Nirvana #apps

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

After spending more time on changing apps than I'd care to admit, I finally realized that it was turning into something of a hobby, and I'd be better off picking something, accepting its limitations, and trying to make it work.

Over the past few years, I've been plagued by the “Feature chasing” virus.

I promised myself to stick with one productivity system after testing out several tools in 2018, then I rediscovered GTD with the Nirvana app in 2018, I jumped between Nirvana and Todoist, I kept using Nirvana for a while in 2020 only to get back to Todoist at the end of 2020, used it for a while throughout 2021 and got a little annoyed with the number of new features and updates the app was getting.

After 7+ months of tweaking Todoist tags, flags, and filters to conform with GTD I concluded that the hassle was not worth it. While Todoist offers some cool things like the perfect calendar integration and the natural language input, the way it manages projects and sub-tasks is still clunky (to me).

I am project-oriented so I usually have 10 to 20 active projects at one time. And their status can change on a weekly basis. That means if a project becomes “inactive” or “on-hold” I want to easily change its status and not have any next actions related to it showing up on my daily lists. I solved that in Todoist by creating separate folders for “someday/maybe” projects and used filters to exclude those from my active lists. It worked for the most part, but the process of moving projects/folders in Todoist has not been smooth for me.

I just think Todoist is cumbersome for projects. Maybe if I stopped using projects and not linking next actions to projects I would like Todoist better.

But I use projects. A lot! I quickly tried Microsoft To-Do using hashtags to filter next actions by projects but at some time point, the hashtags became pretty messy. And they weren’t good placeholders for my next actions. I totally lost control.

I still prefer the way Nirvana handles projects: it's built in the system.

So I'm settling back down with the Nirvana app. I think it conforms with how my brain works. It covers the GTD method elegantly with simplicity.

Reasons why I prefer Nirvana:

• Nirvana has that .txt simplicity. I think having an extremely colorful to-do list manager was distracting to me. I like some colors, so I added a few emojis to Nirvana’s tags and I’m happy with it. (Note: not all emojis work in Nirvana, I’m not sure why, but some do).
• In Nirvana, I can actually add a due date to a project and mark it as complete. I love this!
• The projects list is way more organized. It's clear to see what is active and what isn't.
• Someday-Maybe is managed in a much better way with its native functionality.
• To read more: I talk a little about how Nirvana works here.

A snapshot of some tags I keep in Nirvana

So I’ve experimented a lot this past year…

… and I’ve read a lot about GTD and productivity. I used to receive weekly news and articles about productivity tools and I decided to let go of all that. Consuming productivity content was making me anxious.

I was induced to keep trying new tools...

…Experimenting with different methods…

…Spending whole weekends tweaking an app…

…And it wasn’t working. The perfect tool was never there.

There was a book that helped me a lot last year: The Getting Things Done Workbook by David Allen and Brandon Hall. It’s an action-oriented guide based on the GTD principles and it made me realize I was overcomplicating everything!

2021 was a year I learned a lot about myself. I developed a better sense of how my brain works and its preferences. And I concluded that the GTD workflow still aligns with me. I rediscovered Nirvana, a simple tool that I always enjoyed.

I also set up an Excel spreadsheet to help me organize what GTD describes as “Higher Horizons”:

• Horizon 02: Areas of Focus
• Horizon 03: Goals
• Horizon 04: Vision

And in this same spreadsheet, I have a tab for my quarterly/monthly Planning.

I will write a future post about this spreadsheet. It’s working beautifully! 😍

#GTD #Nirvana #Productivity

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By Noisy Deadlines Minimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.

🎈 Things I write about :

Sections:

🎨 #NoisyMusings: a little bit of everything 📂 #Productivity: organization, methods, apps, GTD 📚 #Books: everything book related

Some Topics:

#apps | #Nirvana (the app, not the band) | #Todoist | #GTD | #MSTodo | #notes | #journal | #journaling #BookReview | #ReadingList | #Reading | #ReaderGoals | #BookWyrm

#internet | #socialmedia | #attentionresistance #minimalism | #digitalminimalism #outdoors | #Hiking | #winter #iceskating

#music | #heavymetal

For a complete list of my blog posts grouped by year, click here.

For a summary list of my blog posts in a lightweight reading interface, click here.