Home chores

Every Friday, my wife and I discuss things to be done over the weekend and send each other messages on Telegram. Over the weekend, we keep editing the messages with a tick emoji to mark them done. These include utility bills, some groceries, home maintenance stuff, Urban Company service bookings, finding or buying something, cleaning car or scooter, and similar.

I schedule a message on Telegram for following Friday with items that were not done around 10PM so it comes up in the following weekend's planning.

Personal to-dos

• Apple reminders for writing blogs. I do that mostly after midnight during weekdays or afternoons during weekends.

• Some random rabbit hole on Pinterest or YouTube. After midnight on most days before sleeping.

• Most of the things that I need to do for individual reasons or work-aiding reasons, I put them up on Apple Calendar and keep those widgets on my phone home screen as well as a dedicated maximised reminders app on mac on a separate OS desktop.

• Any time a new item comes to my mind, I immediately put it on reminders app (from any of my devices) with tentative time, notes etc. It takes about 30-40 seconds more to fill out more details beyond just the title so worth it!

Work to-dos

• I reply on Slack if it's supposed to take me less than 3-5 mins to get context, think quickly and reply. Else, I acknowledge and ping to reply later. I keep a lot of marked unread on Slack to let the red dot bother me to check later.

• I use the same rule of 3-5 minutes for anything at work — a quick conversation, a quick decision, a quick feedback, etc.

• I intentionally duplicate my to-dos across reminders app, using post-its pasted at the edge of my laptop, on a small muji passport notebook that's always on me, between DMs with my EA, on my work calendar, on my palm, a post-it on the desk mat and such. Given the number of context switches in my area of work, I increase the surface area of visibility of what I need to do.

• I don't manage calendar well. I mostly put reminders on calendar too that I keep moving around depending on the device I need to work on to get the to-do done or energy required to finish that to-do

• I also procrastinate things that I know I can pull off in short time till the last moment. Not ideal, but I've become comfortable with it.

Basically, Apple reminders for all things home chores, personal to-dos, Google Calendar + post-its + EA's help for work to-dos work for me.

P.S. I don't end up completing 50% of the tasks I decide for a week. The above are the processes which work for the tasks I end up completing. For the ones that don't complete, I attempt again.