ADHD and hacking an ever growing todo list

Are you familiar with FOMO? Surely.

After using TickTick for long enough and judging my stats, I've noticed I was efficient at solving tasks I focused on, even if I was not always focusing on the most important ones. Yet I have this feeling of being overwhelmed by my self imposed todo list. Whatever I do and it doesn't matter how long I work on my todos, the list keeps growing and distracts me from living my life far from screens. There must be rationale explanations and a solutions, right?

I've revisited my backlog hundred times without allowing me to delete those items nor finding the motivation to tackle enough of them. Occasionally I would do some triage, e.g I bump the priority on some favorite tasks by adding custom tags like "x2", x3" etc. It allow me to find such favorite items later and sort them by priority/urgency.

Yet I still had around 400+ tasks, far from my Inbox Zero principle. How to solve that? I did managed to be efficient at email triage, and at automation, coding, problem solving, I could likely win in any board game, I'm a debrouillard, I know. So how do I solve my tiny issue with my todos without depraving myself of sleep, and without recycling my todo items into the thrash?

The key is most of those todos are not urgent and will be solved in the long term, without specific date. They ressemble more the concept of an idea or an inspiration, or motivation, rather than a problem to be solved.

And that's for now my trick to tackle those needed-for-later items in TickTick -> Tag them as "💡ideas" and convert into Note.


Slice the backlog

Je souffre de TDAH et c'est bien galÚre de prioriser des tùches plutÎt que d'autres, tant la passion de tout faire est présente. Parfois pourtant on se retrouve submergé.

AprĂšs avoir lu les 4 premiers tomes de la BD Samurai, le cycle de l'empereur et du treisiĂšme phophĂšte donc, je me suis remis Ă  gribouiller, un Samurai bien entendu, devant mon fils admiratif (il a quatre ans, Ă©videmment que tout ce que je dessine lui paraĂźt bien ;-p). Bref j'ai eu envie de m'appliquer Ă  la mĂȘme discipline, Ă  dĂ©faut de lames j'opte pour le dĂ©graissage de ma liste de tĂąches sur TickTick.

Et ça tombe bien, je suis en train de lire La semaine de 4 heures de Tim Ferris, il y a un passage qui m'a fortement marquĂ©, pour aider Ă  faire le tri entre les envies et les choses qu'on doit absolument faire. Je n'ai pu m'empĂȘcher de penser Ă  Steve Jobs qui avait pour rĂ©putation d'associer le moins Ă  la perfection et le surplus Ă  une absence de vision.

Bref, j'ai une liste TickTick de plus de 500 tĂąches, dont certaines reviennent chaque semaine, et chaque jour mon lecteur de flux RSS rĂ©cupĂšre de nouvelles entrĂ©es passionnantes. J'ai Ă©galement une famille avec laquelle j'essaie de passer du temps de qualitĂ©, plein de projets, de livres, sĂ©ries TV, films dans mes envies. On n'a pas forcĂ©ment de contrĂŽle sur le temps qui passe, et l'argent va et vient, mais ne rĂ©soud pas tout. Par contre je peux choisir oĂč mettre mon Ă©nergie.

En conscience de tous les travaux de rénovation qui m'attendent, de la famille qui va s'agrandir d'ici septembre, de mon travail accaparrant en tant qu'indépendant, il me faut vraiment tailler dans le lard.

J'ai donc ajouté une tùche récurrente dans TickTick pour éliminer une dizaine de tùches au quotidien, toute chose qui me prendra du temps et qui n'est qu'une idée/envie, finira sans doute à la poubelle ou devra aller ailleurs que dans TickTick.


A castle made of bazaar

I've accumulated quite a lot of nerd automations in my tech stack, I'll try to give an idea of what I've done up to this day

For the Cloudron instance I run

  • A cron job that monitor disk usage, using bash +Cloudron API, it will alert me via email and ntfy when any folder usage > 75%.
  • A cron job that checks if some apps time out and restart them via Cloudron API. In bash too.

DNS Monitoring

  • I take a snapshot of my Hetzner DNS configs every 5 minutes and watch frequently for diffs using Changedetection.

Uptime monitoring

  • I'm using Uptime Kuma to monitor the status pages of several services/APIs I'm relying on (Dropbox, OpenAI, Mistral AI, ...) as well as my own self-hosted apps. I get ntfy alerts in case any is failing.

Feed generators

Files Syncing

  • A cron job syncing my .torrent files from Dropbox to QBittorrent, using rclone
  • A cron job syncing my downloaded audiobooks to AudioBookShelf, using rsync.
  • A cron job syncing my downloaded ebooks to Calibre, by uploading the files to Calibre API, using bash.

Music management

  • A cron job syncing my downloaded music (torrent) to my main Music Library, using rsync.
  • A cron job verifying the quality of my Music Library content using mp3val and reporting for corrupted files via ntfy.
  • A cron job verifying the quality of my Soulseek download folder using mp3val and only moving the verified ones to my Music Library.
  • A user script integrating with ListenBrainz/LastFM scrobbler for when I listen to live radios from RTBF (they use radioplayer technology).
  • A user script to filter automatically the search results within Soulseek (web version running on Cloudron).

Photos management

  • A cron job that syncs my photos library between Dropbox and Immich, using rclone, but only for pics and videos under a certain size.
  • A cron job that generate Immich album only made of pictures of specific persons.
  • Scripts that I run ad-hoc, using ffmpeg, to compress my pictures, videos, fix their EXIF date at need.
  • Scripts that I run ad-hoc, using Syncthing, to remove all pics/videos from my Phone (WhatsApp and Camera folders) and move them to Dropbox, before I compress and triage them. Anything on Dropbox is then sync to Immich, so that's how I keep my phone clean.

Emails management

  • A script which checks for invoices (with attachments or downloadable links) in my emails and sends them to my Dropbox forwarding email, which in turn backups those attachments in a specific folder which can be treated.

Freelancer paperwork management

  • I have several scripts to rename my receipts and invoices with the right date, invoice nr, provider and organize them per year/quarter/month, it's done in PHP.
  • A user script to fill my timesheet automatically based on my declared days off.

Web curation and bookmark management

  • A cron job that will browse my recent Shaarli shares and, when needed, add tags, HN Thread links, Web Archive link, and a summary. It's done in Python.
  • A cron job that will browse my Miniflux unread entries and mark as read the ones that I will probably not care about. using Mistral AI.
  • A cron job that will browse my Miniflux unread entries and send me an email with the unread entries summarized and grouped by feed, a bit like feu Subworthy.com (by Phil Stephens) was doing around 2022.
  • A user script that will add TLDRs buttons at the bottom of my Miniflux entries, so I can get a quick summary generated by Mistral AI, at need.
  • A user script to warn me on any website if there is a Hacker News thread for the page I visit.
  • A user script to highlight and extract all top links from the current Hacker News thread.

LinkedIn management

  • A user script that adds a reply generator in LinkedIn conversations, using Mistral AI.

Obsidian Backups

  • I'm using aicommit2 called from Obsidian Git plugin to generate meaningful commit messages about what is being backed up.

This looks quite a lot, and that's not all.


Productivity monk

I have taken a few habits recently:

  • Inbox zero by bedtime. Unhandled mails go to TickTick.
  • Tasks default to next week. If they matter, they’ll wait.
  • One work task per day. If it drags, I commit or kill it.
  • Articles get bookmarked. Read later—or never. Doesn’t matter.
  • Tasks get automated. Or ignored.
  • Midnight is my hard stop. Usually...
  • Everything goes in TickTick.
  • No date = no task. No surprises.
  • Task and blog ideas are dumped into TickTick as notes, voice or text.
  • LLMs get a few hours. That’s it. And only for automation.
  • LinkedIn runs on auto-reply.
  • Same rules at home and work. One brain. Scripts everywhere.
  • I keep folders of tabs—Wednesday, Friday, Daily. I open them when it’s time. Not before.
  • I use browser userscripts to bend websites to my will. UX included.
  • Family runs on self-service. Automation takes care of the rest.
  • And a few things don’t change—only improve: Backups and monitoring for everything. Unit tests for all my scripts. And pipelines. Obviously.

This isn’t a system. It’s survival. Simplicity is the only thing that scales, especially with kids and ADHD.


Things nerds commonly have, but I don’t

Inspiration: https://forkingmad.blog/things-people-commonly-have-but-i-dont/

In a conversation recently with a colleague I casually mentioned I didn't have something. He was shocked... "but how then do you..." was the response.

So here's my list of don't haves

  • Spotify account. I have CDs and I've bought a CD player from KLIM. I just find the CD to be a very nice looking and collectible object, pleasant to listen to. Also I feel it's mine, and I like the creative goodies and packaging that you don't have with a digital copy of an album.
  • A NAS. I don't need a NAS to backup pictures or stream videos through Plex. I have a VPS where I run a Cloudron which hosts most of my web apps, one is for sharing my family pictures. And I also use Syncthing, and Dropbox to keep my photos in sync and backed up in several places. And next to that I use Plex but I just don't host it on my infra, I pay a provider for their generous bandwidth and for the fact they take care of streaming my content through Plex. It's so fluid. I couldn't and wouldn't maintain this at home.
  • A gaming machine nor a gaming chair. Seriously I do not see the point, because I consider most games do not require super advanced graphics or material to be fun. In fact I love minimalistic games with pixellated art. I'm old and also feel nostalgic of specific games that are all forgotten now. Anyway I'm developing the best game ever, which is the only one I play. More about this soon, when I'll buy the domain for the website, after I decide on a name.
  • A mechanical keyboard. Seriously, what's the deal is with those noisy expensive impractical keyboards.
  • A 3D Printer. Seriously, this is so cool to possess one, I just don't have the space for this now. Maybe when I'll have my own space in our future home.
  • A VPN. Sure it sounds secure but it's just someone else glorified proxy, and it's vulnerable to authority requiring logs or to any part getting compromised. You have to blindly and naively trust the VPN and people behind it to not disclose your information when their company will be required to by the authority. If different contexts I use them, i.e at work, of course, wherever it's mandatory.


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