Writing down is a sign-post for you to stay in your lane.

Otherwise, you were working on a task and something fail in your terminal; by evening you realize you spent the last 4 hours fixing your entire dotfiles, fixing environment, shell, and what-not to move easily between machines smoothly (you also realized you are not moving machines anytime soon).

The Frog to Eat that you wrote down yesterday for today, and the other tasks that has to be done today is there for you to see - bright, and clear - helps you steer back when your minds starts to wander, phone distracts, and HN is tempting for more comments.

▲ dotancohen 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I see, thanks.

  > Writing down is a sign-post for you to stay in your lane.

I think I get it now. When I'm developing a feature, I'll first write a commented git commit message. I'll refer back to it every so often to ensure that whatever that commit message says, that's what I'm doing. Everything else that I want to do should go into an Org mode file that is not committed.

  > #git commit -m "Foo the bar"

Is what I'm debugging now directly related to fooing the bar? If not, write it down and get back to fooing the bar.

▲

Brajeshwar 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As we have come this far, here is another POV for writing things down, when it comes to “NO” or “Not Now!” items that get streamed in our lives.

You are working on something, but a cool/new/interesting thing pops into your brain or someone pings/calls/texts to tell you about something; your default is to do that first lest you forget about it. No, Don’t Do That. Instead, write it down so you don’t forget, but no need to worry for now. Empathetically, if that item was from someone (even in person), seeing you writing it down suggests to the person that you care about it and will definitely come back to it.

At the end of your day, during your break, or after your task-at-hand is complete, visit and “decide” when/how you want to do it, whether you need to do it, or if it has solved on its own in the time you have ignored.

I do use Project Managers, Calendars, Apple Notes/Obsidian, Phone Apps, etc., but if I use that as “defaults” (not on physical pen/paper), I might get tempted to finish something else along with it. That note-taking in the same format as my primary work will likely tempt me to do more and make it look like work or productivity.

With a physical pen/paper, it is a clean, minimal, simple UX that never distracts. That is how it is. I’m still learning and experimenting, but so far I write as usual in a notebook and kinda bullet-journal[1] backwards (mine is simplified), starting from the last page of the same notebook for tasks and to-dos. That one notebook is the one that I carry around.

1. https://bulletjournal.com/

	▲	dotancohen 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		So new tasks become a queue instead of a stack. Nice idea!

▲

bthallplz 22 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Neat! I think I've done a similar thing in Jujutsu VCS, which enables you to start a new commit and add a message (description) to it well before you make any actual changes. As you described, it's a really useful way of keeping on track.