Zettelkasten/Patterns/Todo Lists

Overview

The Zettelkasten/Patterns page has covered some useful patterns for using a Zettelkasten to keep track of daily notes. Now we get into how the Zettelkasten can be used to keep track of todo lists. You'll see some of the same concepts we covered for the Zettelkasten/Patterns/Daily Page Pattern and Zettelkasten/Patterns/Page Organization patterns.

The Todo Category

Before we get into how we organize todo lists, we should mention that we make heavy use of this pattern, so we have many todo lists. To keep track of all the todo lists, it can be useful to have a way to get a list of todo lists.

To keep track of our todo list pages, we add the category Category:Todo to all todo lists. If we need to see all our todo lists in one place, we just visit that Category page, and the list of todo lists is there.

Start with Top Level Sections

When starting a todo list page, we use a strategy covered in the Zettelkasten/Patterns/Page Organization pattern, which is to reserve top-level sections for different purposes the page may serve.

Typical top-level sections are:

• Overview - used if we are revisiting the page and need a brief summary of the most important information
• Plan - contains planned todo items, work that is not yet in progress
• Todo - contains items that are currently in progress, usually notes from today or this week (and empty if a todo page is not being actively used)
• Done - items that were previously in Todo, but were completed
• Notes - a top-level section that contains notes about the todo list topic. Not necessarily todo items, but useful/related to the todo list.

Date Subsections

When filling in the top-level Todo section, we add a second-level subsection with the date (YYYYMMDD format), then one or more third-level subsections with the topics of each todo item.

Besides keeping information organized neatly into sections, we don't use any other special patterns to organize todo information. Sometimes we have a bullet list of items to complete, one by one, and sometimes we have a brief sentence describing some action taken.

Sometimes, we aren't keeping careful track of what we're doing, and we finished a bunch of todo items without keeping notes of what we're doing. In that case, we back-fill as best we can. We put brief descriptions if we don't have details, or add more information if it's available.

This pattern has the added advantage that if a single task that is supposed to be simple turns into a wild goose chase involving ten other steps, it's easy to keep track of what's being done chronologically - just add a new subsection to the corresponding date for each new direction the wild goose chase takes.

Combine several of above patterns, apply them to todo lists

• When creating a Todo page, add top level sections: Overview, Planned, Todo, Done, Notes
• Start with the notes
• Move on to the plan
• Implement todo items as you work your way through plan
• Top level sections: Overview, Planned, Todo, Done, Notes
• Second level sections: date
• Third level sections: topics
• When starting to work on a todo item, create second level date section, and third level topic section
• Take notes in that subsection
• Overview is usually added last, revised over time, contains important summary of information
• Example: if setting up a VPN network on a server, take notes on the server's todo page
  • notes for how VPN was set up are organized by date
  • if you take multiple days to set up the VPN, notes organized chronologically then topically
  • if you come back in six months to fix one thing, notes are still organized together, still chronological