I’ve been using the Things app to track all my personal to-do’s and projects for a couple of years now. I love this Mac-assed Mac app and use it all the time.
I recently discovered how to get access to the Things database and took the chance to reflect on how I’m spending my time.
So here are some highlights of all my “Things” in 2020.
Lastly year, I completed 108 personal projects. Each project consists of a number of specific to-do items (tasks). A project can be something small like 🛳 Renew passport (6 tasks) or big like 🎸Convert guest room to a music studio (31 tasks).
I generally include an emoji in my project names because somehow they help motivate me. 🤷🏻♂️
Some favorite completed projects of 2020 were:
- 🗳Vote (3 tasks)
- 🤹♂️Plan for best self (7 tasks)
- 🦠Corona (5 tasks), my most fitting “project” for 2020
I canceled 9 projects, such as:
- 🌶Home gardening
- 🥋Grav Maga
- 🦃 Holiday family plans, the most fitting cancellation for 2020
I completed 11 projects to “fix” things, including:
- 🐍Fix that gap under my door (3 tasks)
- 🥁Fix drums (luckily only 2 tasks and zero dollars)
- ✍️Blog fix up (6 tasks)
Top project in progress:
- 📘Write a book (43 tasks completed, many more to go — and growing)
In 2020, I completed about 7 per day on average. This is useful because it tells me how to pace myself.
I canceled about 1.4 per day. Canceling isn’t a bad thing — it’s just the opposite. It’s a conscious choice not to do something you thought you needed to do.
Going into the new year, I have 62 projects in progress. Hmm, it already looks like a busy year coming up. 🤔
Here is one of the SQLite queries I used for this post. 👨🏻💻
SELECT title, date(creationDate, 'unixepoch') as start, date(stopDate, 'unixepoch') as stop from TMTask
WHERE type = 1
AND status = 3
AND date(creationDate, 'unixepoch') BETWEEN '2020-01-01' AND '2020-12-31'
ORDER BY creationDate
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