After many revisions on the basic to-do list idea, I’ve settled on what is essentially a buffer.  I love immersing myself in information – books, music, podcasts, blogs, traditional media, emails, radio, newspaper, tv, etc. but there’s just too much to do justice to.  If I tried to find a straight path through the mess, there would be lots of good content slipping by.

In order to catch these valuable bits, I use a modified to-do list.  I keep an email draft in my Gmail inbox and a notepad document up on the screen which together contain anything interesting I’ve encountered and have yet to process.

Say I’m reading a post about books and there are links to a good author.  I haven’t finished the first post yet so jumping in a new direction or opening a new tab in the background would leave me scattered.  I add the author’s name and a link to the book to my ‘buffer’ and finish where I was at. When I’ve got time, I can work through things on this list which aren’t dreaded tasks.  I perceive them as anticipated points of interest.

The list grows and shrinks according to my level of busyness but higher-priority items get picked off first and those that in hindsight don’t really matter can get periodically bumped off and out of the way.  So far, it’s been fantastic way to reign in my easily distracted mind to actually finish things in some semblance of order.

For example:

Blog posts

-10,000 year clock

-Map guy

-Photosynth of inauguration

-Post portfolio pieces

-Prairie Home Companion Streaming

-Books

-Buffer

guitar hero songs

research jboss

contribute to mediawiki

open filer

FreeNAS

pfSense

try systemBoot Disk

Pound – http load balancer

Ruby on rails with Bear

Ruby on rails book

try clonezilla disc

shorting stock

technology singularity

PKAL work  – images as headers, image upload issue

Try out OpenMeetings

Try out CloudVPN