I hope it doesn’t surprise anyone that I love a good checklist. After all, checklists are what got me started down the path of Emacs about 7 years ago. I love a good checklist. It tells me what I need to do, in what order, and allows me to get back on track after I get distracted. A good checklist can really make a day go right, and it’s a good idea to start the work day with one.

My new morning checklist is still a work in progress, but here is what it looks like:

    [ ] VPN > RMD work computer
    [ ] Outlook:
      [ ] Meetings > org-mode "MEETING"
      [ ] Pins > org-mode "Email"
      [ ] Emails > pin or add to org-mode "Email:" (don't reply, we want to finish this checklist)
    [ ] org-mode Agenda
      [ ] MEETING (todos) > projects
      [ ] choose personal projects (choose one personal project first!)
      [ ] choose an afternoon work project
    [ ] Journelly

It is still a work in progress: a good checklist is a result of trial and error over many repetitions, but the core is there.

First, if I work from home, I want to remind myself to VPN in and use my work PC rather than my Mac (RMD is remote desktop, which is my preferred method for connecting to my work PC). This has a couple of benefits, but a few of the main ones: URLs open natively in Edge, my default browser on the PC, leaving my personal side of things on my Mac with Safari. Outlook and Teams also work as expected on Windows better than on the Mac. Then, of course, there are various admin tools I need to run from inside our network.

Then, in Outlook, the checklist prevents me from replying to emails. This is important (you’d see I have a reminder for myself there not to reply) because I can’t get dragged into replying in the morning. There are too many emails in my inbox, and I need to prioritize what I do when. I tend to pin emails I want to get back to later in the day. In the morning, I add those pins to org-mode using my email template, and I pin new emails I need to get back to (which, in turn, will also end up in org-mode).

Then it’s time for my agenda in org-mode. The agenda is the meat of my day, where the projects I’m supposed to work on are laid out. Before I get to the projects themselves though, I go through my meetings that I copied into org-mode and look for TODO items, which need to be turned into projects or assigned to someone else.

The next step is particularly important to me these days, amid the endless work: find and prioritize a personal project. This can be anything, from calling back a doctor to working on a new checklist, like the one above. The afternoon work project is usually a bigger undertaking. I get back to it after my midday nap and exercise, which I try to do every day if I can. This hour to an hour and a half of “me time” is what keeps me healthy physically and mentally; I should probably expand on that soon.

Finally, a favorite of mine nowadays is to go into Journelly, where I keep my journal in an org file, and reflect on the choices I’ve made for the personal project and the work project. It allows me to mentally prepare for work.

With the checklist done, I start working on my agenda in org-mode. I usually go through the TODOs I’ve listed for myself in order, clock in, and get them done. Most of my work these days involves contacting others and following up, so I add notes on what was said and by whom in the task, clock out, and move on (unless something gets done of course).

I’ve been doing this for about a week, and it’s been working quite nicely. I hope to keep going and see what more changes need to be implemented.