Comment by GZGavinZhao
5 hours ago
I often suffer from having too many things I want to work on, plus impulsive tasks (e.g. I saw an issue on GH that I happen to know how to solve) that I go on and spend 3 hours to do right away, causing delay in everything else more important. I force myself to only spend time on tasks on the "Active" view (minus a very small set of exceptions). All other impulsive thoughts go into "Backlog" status. Every night I review the "Backlog" view and move issues that I actually decide to do in the "Active" view. Also obviously you have to periodically clean up "Backlog".
That is the most important value Linear brings to me. There are other tools that can achieve similar effects, but I learned how to do it with Linear at work so I stuck with that. On top of this, Linear has priorities, deadlines, task blocking relations, etc., that naturally reflect how I prioritize issues in life. This is the same as how I prioritize tasks to do at work. Once again there are tools to do this outside of Linear, but none of them are as polished to use and just work.
I really applaud your discipline. It took me a long time to realize that the todo system you use is almost meaningless if you don't execute on the items that you prioritized.
Haha thank you, I must admit I can't make it always work out, but writing (typing) them down and forcing myself to look at the view to remind my brain is a lot better than juggling all the priorities around in my head. I really really hate planning tasks, I just want to do things and write code, so Linear is a good way for me to offload these computations and just focus on clearing the list.