I'm that kind of person that struggled really hard to self-educate to be organized. That had to change in favor of restoring my sanity back and one day the light bulb hover my head went on.
The issue
Everything was messy before: tasks and notes written in loose papers or random task management software, unanswered calls lost in promises to be returned, files and important documents spread along a zillion different cloud storage services. Resuming, everything was darker back then.
I've tried lots of software that promised to simplify the horror I was going through and actually help me getting things done and don't forget anything - but all of them failed. Most of the times it wasn't about the softwares themselves but simply because they didn't fit my way of doing things.
The tada moment
I was on the verge of collapse, navigating through some issues on a repository on Github when: tada! Suddenly everything was clear. I was already using an awesome software (Github) to manage my projects' code, issues and tasks that had to be done, why not adapt it to a new "project": My personal life!
How I did it
Basically what I did was to adapt the concept we (developers) already employ for project management and organization on Github to my personal life. So, instead of having a repository to store and keep track of my code, I'd instead use it to store and keep track of any important documents, pictures and other random files I can't loose.
It was pretty straight forward and showed advantages right away after setting up that new private repository which I named personal. The most noticeable one was after I fed it with important documents I went to another laptop I own and cloned the repository. In ~5 seconds I had my documents "synced" on both machines, securely saved on a private Github repository and easily manageable on both Github interface and on my dear terminal with the infamous git tool.
This was the first step to start implementing a better organization for all-my-things, however one thing was still missing: I also had to keep track of both my personal and professional tasks (professional = freelancing/open source projects, not organization-specific ones).
To achieve that, I enabled the "Github Projects" feature on that repository and bootstrapped two projects: "Personal" and "Work" for personal (shopping, pay bills, etc.) and work-specific (call a client, reply an email, review a feature, etc.) tasks respectively.
Each project has 4 basic columns to put tasks on:
- Backlog - for stuff I probably haven't yet decided to do or thought about how I'd do them;
- To Do - stuff I have to do and are ready to be started or I'm waiting on third-party feedback to move along;
- In Progress - stuff I'm working on at the moment.
- Done - stuff I already finished and can be safely archived and sometimes forgot.
Tasks themselves are simple "cards" or full detailed issues (for more important/complex things that need extra information).
Now I had it all (files and tasks) in a single place that I love to work on! So much better! Sure I still sometimes write tasks and notes on paper or on my smartphone's notes application, however I made a commitment with myself to as soon as I open my laptop through the tasks/notes into the respective projects on Github right away.
Apart from those two base projects, one is also free to create more and more projects to make organization even clear and simpler. For example, imagine you're moving from a city to another, there are plenty of things you have to do and most of them are important to be done right to avoid headaches in the future. One could create a new "Move to X place" project and a correspondent milestone (on Issues Tracker) to keep track of that process and don't miss a thing.
I guess there are already people doing "self-management" in a similar fashion to what I'm now doing with Github, but as I haven't seen any experiences alike on the web I thought that it could be interesting to share this with others and maybe get some feedback on this "system" or suggestions to improve it.
Hope you've enjoyed! Don't forget that the way I'm organizing tasks, for example, is oriented for my personal use cases and surely doesn't fit everyone's needs. You can still adapt it to your own way of organizing things to make this system work better for yourself.
Thanks Github, for saving my day once more!
Latest comments (47)
Hmm, or using a branch to store secret stuff ... (Sorry can't stop thinking about this :)
Very Cool! Ironically, I just started using github as my main "project management" tool, for all (in hindsight) obvious reasons that you state for using github just this week (after flopping back and forth between trello, asana, todoist, workflowy, etc.
It just never occurred to me to do this for my personal life, excellent idea!
Just wanted to drop a note to say thank you. I've used software for notes and other software for todos. This seems like a great way to merge the two.
Hi João, thanks for this great article. I started using it the same way as you do and it feels like it is a perfect fit for me. I never created so many issues but I also never got so many things done!
I only use two projects (private and work) and if there is something that could be a project by itself I create a milestone for that which gives me a nice overview of the progress.
So thanks again for sharing, it changed a lot for me!
I think about doing something like this sometimes but then talk myself out of it by understanding one system is for code and another system has to be for my life, tasks, events, and such.
There are a few things I would love to version control, but even then I can't use anything except rich text files or maybe even GFM. I wonder what type of files you're storing in this repo since you're only able to actually get the final version from that save-cycle.
Isn't this an overkill? I mean, if it works for you, who am I to judge, and I guess you've liked it so much because Github is already in your daily workflow, but there are much simpler/more effective systems to do the same thing (Evernote, OneNote, a simple Dropbox folder where you categorize and sync stuff). Still, an interesting read and approach :)
Awesome idea!! <3
I use a similar system. I find it useful because of the following aspect: we generally only commit/push code when work is done. It's a good feeling, possibly even a dopamine reward in the brain. So, I find that I'm motivated by the same reward to complete my TODO tasks in my personal stuff.
Nice catch! But it will not work on the go. GitHub has a lack of good mobile tools with offline access. :(
Wow, thanks, this is really clever! By the way, if people want to achieve the same but for free, they can maybe use Gitlab.com. The free account allows to use private repositories and issue boards that look like the ones from Github.
I could totally see how each of my girlfriends could be a branch. Here is to one day be able to merge one of them into master.
The git log becomes a meaningful diary.
Nice write up. Will try your approach.
I used to use vimviki and have a cron job commit the changes on a daily basis, but this seems more interesting.
I've tried this before, but the lack of a reminder system that works out of the box has always made me move back to Google Keep
Nice! I guess a lot us have struggles when it comes to manage our personal lives and this can be really helpful.
I see that your idea sounds a lot like a kanban board, except by the documents. I think that a well adapted kanban software may be more accurated and easy to use since can bring us a grafical view of what really is going on at the moment.
I would be happy to hear ideas about it :)
Btw! It's my first participation on the community, i'm glad to say hello to every one! Hope my english is good enough!
I love your ideas. My challenge always seems to be decent mobile access to my notes.