Brett's secret to juggling so many projects

General Nerdery
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Thats a clickbait title – I have no idea how he does it, and I want to know.

@ttscoff – how do you keep track of all your projects? I mean, you have podcasts, Marked, bunch, a lot of other tools, and you document all of it so elegantly. Somehow you keep track of it all. How?

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Within each project there’s a TaskPaper file that helps me track todos and bugs and what not. Whenever I complete a change, it gets a Git commit that shows up in the changelog next time I deploy. If there’s new/changed functionality, I immediately add it to the documentation before I lose track of it. There’s a lot of automation to make all of this easy to handle.

I wish I had a better answer for how I keep track of ALL my projects, but I use OmniFocus and do a terrible job of reviewing regularly. I just work on what feels important at any given time, and a lot of my projects fall by the wayside when I get focused on something else. It’s usually a bug report or feature request that brings them back to my attention… Podcasts come up on my calendar, editing and publishing is just top of mind after recording. Marked and Bunch are both stable at this point and the only time they get attention is when someone reports/requests something. And all of my other projects are just at my whim.

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Thanks! Is there overlap between the tasks in the TaskPaper file and tasks in OmniFocus?

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Not often. I have OF projects with overarching goals for projects as tasks, but the nitty gritty stuff is all in TP files. The exceptions would be commercial projects like Marked, where an email with a bug report might get linked to an OF task with a due date, and then repeated in the TP file, but if I put a due date on something, it’s probably going into OF where I’ll actually get notifications.

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Got it. It sounds like OmniFocus is functioning more like a project tracker than tasks (outside of the reminders)

Thanks!

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I may be an audience of one, but I would love to see @ttscoff expand on this… maybe as a blog post or something.

Now I should check MacPowerUsers to see if this has been expounded upon previously…

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Any specific questions/areas you’d like more info on? I’ve talked about this “system” a few times, but never in depth and only in passing in some blog posts. I’d be happy to expound a bit, just not sure which parts are of interest. The whole “I work on whatever I feel like” part of it might not be super helpful :slight_smile: .

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A lot of this hinges on people like myself, seeing others and saying, “hey that person must have it all figured out, because they appear outwardly successful…”

When Merlin Mann was on MPU, he would talk about how using a TextExpander shortcut would let him do X Y and Z, and really get into the weeds on how the sausage is made (I think that’s how analogies work, right?). Stuff like that.

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I can dig the idea of getting into the weeds, but I’d do better if someone was asking me specific questions. The stuff I find interesting is rarely the stuff other people would focus on. ADHD makes me focus on the “wrong” parts all too often. I mean, they’re right for me in the moment, but I latch onto details that other people don’t notice, and then totally miss the bigger picture/more important elements.

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