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.
Je souffre de TDAH et c'est bien galère de prioriser des tâches plutôt que d'autres, tant la passion de tout faire est présente. Parfois pourtant on se retrouve submergé.
Après avoir lu les 4 premiers tomes de la BD Samurai, le cycle de l'empereur et du treisième phophète donc, je me suis remis à gribouiller, un Samurai bien entendu, devant mon fils admiratif (il a quatre ans, évidemment que tout ce que je dessine lui paraît bien ;-p). Bref j'ai eu envie de m'appliquer à la même discipline, à défaut de lames j'opte pour le dégraissage de ma liste de tâches 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 marqué, pour aider à faire le tri entre les envies et les choses qu'on doit absolument faire. Je n'ai pu m'empêcher de penser à Steve Jobs qui avait pour réputation d'associer le moins à la perfection et le surplus à une absence de vision.
Bref, j'ai une liste TickTick de plus de 500 tâches, dont certaines reviennent chaque semaine, et chaque jour mon lecteur de flux RSS récupère de nouvelles entrées passionnantes. J'ai également une famille avec laquelle j'essaie de passer du temps de qualité, plein de projets, de livres, séries TV, films dans mes envies. On n'a pas forcément de contrôle sur le temps qui passe, et l'argent va et vient, mais ne résoud pas tout. Par contre je peux choisir où mettre mon énergie.
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 tâche récurrente dans TickTick pour éliminer une dizaine de tâches 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.
#!/usr/bin/env bash
default_rules=(
's/[0-9]\{1,3\}\(\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\)\{3\}/<REDACTED_IP>/g'
's/\b[a-zA-Z0-9._-]\+\.[a-zA-Z]\{2,\}\b/<REDACTED_DOMAIN>/g'
's/\b[A-Za-z0-9+\/=]\{20,\}\b/<REDACTED_TOKEN>/g'
's/\(password=\)\S\+/\1<REDACTED_PASS>/g'
)
rules=()
while [[ $1 =~ ^s/ ]]; do
rules+=("$1")
shift
done
[[ ${#rules[@]} -eq 0 ]] && rules=("${default_rules[@]}")
sed_expr=()
for r in "${rules[@]}"; do
sed_expr+=( -e "$r" )
done
# If files are passed, process them to stdout.
# If none, read from stdin to stdout.
if [[ $# -gt 0 ]]; then
sed "${sed_expr[@]}" "$@"
else
sed "${sed_expr[@]}"
fi
Feel free to reuse, copy, extend, contact me to give feedback! 💚
💌 The best way to get in touch is via my email morgan at zoemp dot be. You can also follow me on the Fediverse / Mastodon at @sansguidon@mamot.fr. I speak (a lot) French, English and a bit of Dutch.
I reply to all recruiters for a long time. This became a chore over time, so I've developed a userscript that is loaded on every LinkedIn conversation, and calls Mistral AI to generate a reply in my preferred style. With every conversation I open, I hit this button and it will reply adequately, with respect to the history of the conversation, my priorities of the moment, the language of the conversation, the tone, etc.
It is then up to me to post the proposed answer as-is or to discard/edit the proposal
Dropbox storage optimization
As a parent, I developed the habit of archiving digital souvenirs of our kid’s life. Those pics and videos accumulate. As someone very organized, I like to avoid duplicates and also save the correct metadata (EXIF) in our pics and videos, which proves to be challenging with older pics from WhatsApp groups.
I wanted also to ensure that every time I get pictures and videos shared via WhatsApp family groups, I collect them in our Dropbox. This is done via Syncthing-Fork (Android client) and syncthing servers running on my Cloudron and my Macbook Pro. Syncthing monitors all folders that can contain videos or pictures. This helps effortlessly move all my pics/videos
Moves all new pics/videos from Android-monitored folders to Dropbox. As those folders are kept in sync via Syncthing, if I move a pic/video out of the monitored Syncthing folder to Dropbox, it removes the pics/videos from all locations monitored by Syncthing on my Android, so it helps organizing things on Dropbox while also making room on my Android device. Syncthing is set up manually, but it’s easy to manage.
Detect all pics/videos which do not contain a face, this is done using YOLOv5 by Ultralytics. The script was generated via LLM.
Compress/convert pictures and videos using https://ffmpeg.org/ which is installed locally, this achieves saving hundred GBs of data thus can reduce the bandwidth and resources needed for downloading, syncing, displaying such files. On top of this, I require less amount of storage, thus I can keep cheaper Dropbox subscription for longer. LLM generated most of the scripts needed for the task.
Newsletters summaries
As explained in a previous blog (https://morgan.zoemp.be/indieblog/), I'm keeping track of all new blog posts listed in https://indieblog.page/. I first cooked a daily RSS for it, using LLMs. This proved useful but as the list of RSS feeds grows over time, I came to realize I needed to better filter the list, or to limit the output. I don't want the filter to be too random, I want it to be based on my taste, so I created another RSS feed which is a LLM-aided summary of the first RSS feed.
Correcting or translating text
I asked an LLM to review this blog post. The instructions were simple: don't mess with my style, just flag the important fixes. I also asked for a permalink suggestion — one single English word, ideally fun or Gilfoyle-approved. The result is what you’re reading now. This very paragraph was, in fact, fully translated from a French original 🙂 .
What else?
I’ve shown a few cases where LLMs save me time or help improve my productivity. There are many more I haven’t covered, where I use LLMs to generate reusable scripts. Once a working solution is cooked, the LLM is out of the picture — most of the time. When a script needs to depend on AI to work, I mostly use Mistral: cheaper than OpenAI, and I don’t have to sacrifice my soul (or card) to use it. Automatic replies and content summaries are cases where interactive AI calls make sense. Still, I prefer to limit such usage — it makes my productivity overly dependent on fragile APIs and unpredictable outputs.
