Satya's blog - To-do lists and food plans

Based on some stuff I posted on identi.ca, and that JaredW. Smith also posted, here are a couple of lifehacks.

(Lifehack: an adjustment to your habit that makes life easier.)

I maintain a spreadsheet with a daily plan of what I'm going to have for lunch and dinner. It's not in any great detail, just two entries every day, for about a week in advance, each entry being something like "pasta" or "KCJI" or "leftover chinese". That helps me plan what to buy, keeps me from too quickly repeating, lets me track where I ate and when, and helps prevent situations where various different leftovers are piling up in the fridge. This plan should be flexible, though, so you can switch stuff around based on immediate needs and wants.

I have a TODO list on my desktop. A program called tomboy, which is available in at least Debian and Ubuntu, lets me put short sticky-notes style windows on my desktop. Tomboy is actually a personal desktop wiki, and there are other sticky note programs out there. A simple text file may work better for some.

The key is, to-do list should contain items to do *today*, and other immediate stuff. Otheriwse stuff just stays on it forever. "Exercise" isn't a TODO list item. "laundry", "treadmill", "clean oven" are TODO list items. Those are the "things I need to do today". Sure, you can also have things like "fix that bug in that program", but if you don't get to it soon, remove it from this list. And yes, you can use a personal bug-tracking system for this, as well.