to do list – Sasha Dichter's Blog

For years I carried around a nice, small Moleskin notebook to every meeting. I had various systems, each typically lasting about a year, to distinguish between note-taking content and next steps.

My notebook was a sacred object which, if lost, set my productivity back by weeks or more. That said, the constant iterating on how to manage the space and my to do list, the inability to search for anything, and my crummy handwriting combined for a system that I knew needed improvement.

This last year, when Zoom meetings started, I stopped using my notebook almost immediately.

This wasn’t a conscious choice: it had more to do with the physical setup of my desk and where I was sitting around my house. For a while I wasn’t taking notes, and I used other systems to track to do’s. It felt like things were working well enough, though I was nervous about what was falling through the cracks.

Then, in March when I really ramped up my external sales and fundraising, I started taking notes in Notion.

Notion is a very powerful tool, and I use about 1% of its functionality (probably less). For me, it’s just Google Docs on steroids, but it’s so fabulous at what I’m using it for that I would miss it terribly if I couldn’t use it.

I like it much much more than Google Docs because:

The interface is slicker, particularly the keystrokes (e.g. I type ‘/to do’ and a to do list appears; I type a dash and hit ‘tab’ and I’m making a bulleted list).
I find file storage in Google Docs disorienting: it always feels like a jumble of searchable docs, instead of “here’s everything all in one place.” With Notion, I click on one URL and all my meeting notes are there, easily organized, and well-structured.
Google tracking all my keystrokes and suggesting what I type next wigs me out.

I create one Notion page per meeting, with clear follow-ups, organized in a super-simple week-to-week structure. It looks like this.

Notion Sales Meeting Notes

This has transformed my work in two ways.

The more obvious point is that it’s so clean and organized. Everything is in one place, I know exactly where to find it, and the to-do’s are so black and white (and so fun to check off) that it makes staying on top of everything a breeze. Plus, because of the simple interface, I find myself using it consistently. At the end of a day with 8+ external meetings, I cannot remember what I promised anyone in the first half of the day…thankfully it’s all there in Notion.

The more subtle point is that taking notes during a meeting keeps me more focused. I listen harder and stay fully dialed in, something that can be difficult with hours of external calls every day.

I like this approach so much that I wonder what I’m going to do when in-person meetings come back, since I don’t think banging away on my keyboard with someone right in front of me is going to work.

Until then, I’m totally devoted to Notion, and I think you might like it too.

I’m terrible at To Do lists.

I’ve tried countless approaches of keeping lists of things I have to do. Each time, a few weeks or a few months in, the lists fill up, overflow, and then mutate. They transform into an ugly, too-long litany of all the things I never got done.

Once that happens, I stop using them daily, meaning they’re essentially useless.

For a while I thought this was a software problem. Most To Do list software have endless features I don’t use. For the way my brain and my days work, I don’t want a project management solution, I just want a list (or a few lists).

I had some success with uber-simple software: I used Wunderlist successfully for more than a year, and Remember the Milk always seems appealing.

But, in the end, these too broke down. My system reverted to the tried-and-true combination of inconsistent handwritten lists in notebooks + my email inbox (where emails marked unread are a “to do” of one kind or another). This really doesn’t work: it reinforces a tendency to focus on urgent over important things, and it also results in some stuff slipping through the cracks.

So I’m at it again, using Asana thanks to peer pressure from my 60 Decibels teammates, but intentionally using 1/100^th of the feature set. It’s only working because of a great, super-simple hack suggested by a teammate.

For each of my To Do lists (I have four of them, three for work and one personal), I was told to create the following four categories:

Today

This week

Next week

Longer term

That’s the hack. It’s absurdly simple, I know. But it’s really working.

What’s great is that, without using lots of features, dependencies or due dates, this helps me use my lists for both tracking and prioritization. It also forces me, in a very direct way (and in a way that due dates never have) to be clear with myself about what I’m going to get done today, this week, next week, or later. Plus, since most real-life tasks have multiple steps, this structure helps me track them easily without needing to put every step as a new To Do: instead, I just change a few words and slide the task from one category to another.

(For example: I’ll have “Reach out to Samitha about scheduling a call this week” in the “Today” category. After I email her, it change it to , “Follow up with Samitha about a meeting this week” and move it to the “This week” category)

I’m finding this hack to be the perfect middle ground between a single endless list with due dates (that I make up and ignore), and an elaborate, futile attempt to schedule and project manage everything—which feels a lot spending too much time on the list and too little time doing important work.

I hope this hack helps you too. Other ideas are welcome, just share them in the comments.