I Need A Dedicated "To Do" Book.

Post Reply New Topic

Either they've changed it or I was a bit dippy when I posted the instructions before (more than likely). I've just taken another look, and this is how I did it this time:

Click Overview on the left
Click Manage Subscriptions on the left
You should then see Watched Forums followed by Watched Topics.

My version of Firefox is 68.8.0 esr (32-bit). Wouldn't expect it to make a difference though.

Thanks. ^^ All the watched topics show up there, but not in my inbox. I don't have any spam filters.

Glad you got it working at last. My email notifications have turned up reliably for a few years now, but there were times before that when they'd stop arriving. Never did figure out why, they seemed to come back all by themselves. It might be worth setting up the sender's email address as a trusted sender (or inclusion list or whatever they call it) in your email account, if it has such a feature. Sometimes there's a feature to rightclick and choose "this is not spam." It's even possible that just setting up a rule to put new messages from that address into a particular folder would convince the software that you wanted to keep them - that's what I do, just to keep things tidy, but like I say I've not been troubled with the missing notifications problem for years, and that might be why.

No, I didn't get it working, I just confirmed that it should be working according to that list.

By "it" I meant the workaround of viewing the list of watched topics. Hence my suggestions for getting the emails back. Probably not much use to you though. In my case it helped a bit when my emailed notifications weren't getting through because I often forget which topics I'm watching. I know they're marked with a little dark blob on the main forum lists, but it's slightly easier to have them all together, and arguably slightly easier to navigate to the first unseen post in each topic. Not exactly ideal of course.

I presume that by "it" you mean getting your email notifications back again?

Notifications returned today, as mysteriously as they left.

Haha, I am exactly the same! I make lists and then lose them, all the time.

Some days the first job is to find and collate back together all of the unchecked tasks from my old to-do lists.

In general I am happy if I make some progress with any of my jobs, even if they aren't really being done in the right order. Because the alternative is generally getting nothing done at all. So small steps are better than none.

It's difficult with bills and forms etc. with fixed deadlines, though. It seems the more pressure I'm under, the more I prevaricate.

Just as they did in my case some years ago.

Making a fresh list each morning is actually a brilliant strategy, I find, as an ever growing list easily turns into more of a psychological burden than a help. Having to actually think about what you can do now, today, lets you parcel things off into smaller achieveable steps.

Of course, by the time I get up at the moment I make my first cup of tea and have a go on a video game, and then the day kind of goes the way of all flesh...

Avoid guilt by adding "make cup of tea" and "play video games" to your list at the start of the day, and then crossing them off.

One problem I get with task lists is the same as with all my possessions - I find it hard to throw them away. When I look at them with a view to doing so, I find a lot of the items could still conceivably be useful as reminders, either about the tasks that still haven't been completed or as a source of information generally. It's not that often that a task is clear-cut enough to just do it in one pass, real life usually seems to get messier than that. And I often jot down bits of information about the tasks. I can put them away out of sight, but I keep seeing them and then I feel a nagging foreboding that I've either got to spend ages going through each item and deciding what to do with it, or live with the anxiety of knowing that there's a lot of random useful information that I haven't organised. Not that any of that stops me creating task lists.

I once went to a lecture on how to run your own business where the speaker reckoned that the most efficient organising method known is, as the final job before going to bed, to take stock of what you've got done that day and to set down what you plan to do tomorrow. For some reason I've not given it much of a trial, but it sounds like it might turn out useful.

I’ve been using trello for two weeks now. Probably the longest I have consistently used one system. The reason I bring it up, ToughDiamond, is because it handles two of the issues you brought up.

You can set up your to-do lists anyway you want, but right now I have just three: To-Do, In Progress, and Done.

So I can move things started to in progress without losing them. Items can be moved from one list to another with drag and drop.

And I can track the things that are done. Once something is Done, say once per day, I can archive them and they are kept together along with all the notes I took on the process toward getting it done. With the date completed. But not cluttering up the main field.

If there are multi-step things to do, the item can be expanded into a checklist and/or additional information, etc.

Sounds worth a try, but it seems it's for Windows 10 - I use Windows 7 32-bit.

Looking around a little more, I'm confused. Some sites say it's Android only and that it needs an Android emulator to work on a PC. Is there anywhere that has a simple download for my OS that doesn't want me to sign into anything? One place sent me to the Microsoft App Store (at least that's what it said it was) which wanted me to log in with my email password before proceeding, and if it's not even going to run on Windows 7, that doesn't seem a wise thing for me to do. Is there a straightforward installation file anywhere?