My history with todo list management: Part 1 of 2 (1983-2004)

Between 1980 and 1983 I was in my first job as a computer operator on shift and didn’t anything more than a pocket diary in order to ensure I didn’t double book myself for a concert or a night out.

In 83 I started getting supervisory duties and from there on I needed to keep track of my schedule and that of others as well as projects. As this was the 80s I started with a paper based filo fax and then after being sent on a course by my work company (remember wang labs?) I used a time management international (tmi) folder.

Electronic devices were in their infancy and at times I had pretty much everything from the psion range ( xpII, 3c,5mx and mc518) an Apple Newton and an HP Jornada.

I eventually settled on a sharp PC 3000 running dos with lotus agenda.

I think that was my favourite as lotus agenda was an amazing piece of work. In fact I have been looking for a replacement for agenda for years.

Around the year 2000, I got into the David Allen “getting things done” and I started to make agenda work with gtd principles. For some reason maybe hardware failure, I then developed my ideas for to do lists, task tracking and gtd in a series of ever more complex excel sheets.

… And that brings me to 2004 when work life changed radically for me as I left the corporate world and started another (my 5th small business) so the story continues in the next part of this blog.

Incomplete Writing

This is not my original idea. I saw it on problogger recently but as someone who is writing documents all the time in my day job and sometimes fiction I appreciate the idea that we shouldn’t stop writing and disrupt our own flow when we write.

This concept is to write with a placeholder of TK or tk wherever we find we need a fact or need to finish a sentence.


It works like this. I may be writing and need to put a fact into this sentence but I don’t know how many people TK live in China so I write TK at that point in the sentence. I may also find I am missing the end of my TK. That was hard to write! But it was easy to type TK. I will then come back to all the instances of TK in my work and go through them replacing them with the real words.

So why TK… well it stands for “to come” ….oh no it doesn’t, to come would be TC…. yes but TK is a letter combination that never occurs in normal English writing and so it is easy to pickup with the find/replace function in your word processor of choice.

I haven’t used it much in blogging, I use it a lot at work in writing business analysis documents and reports. TK has allowed me to get and write most of a report without having to stop and get a statistic or a fact or a reference at the time of an initial draft of a document.

Try it…it works.