Thoughts on Lists and Productivity Apps

Recently I did a full overhaul of my media list. I’m doing a refresh on a few things right now, in preparation for a hopeful future offer that will do very many good things for me.¹

Here’s how my old “setup”, if you can even call it that, worked. I had a Sheets spreadsheet which I initially made to track bands I was listening to. Here’s a screenshot:

Green squares are complete, yellow in progress, red to be done. Orange was for things I’d seen earlier and wanted to revisit. It looks pretty, which was pretty much the only thing going for it, and also its biggest downfall. Because of that desire, it went against every convention of how a spreadsheet worked. It was impossible to re-organise bands with one click, no real way to add new data to a band or album, or filter out any information to look at, say, everything that I’d yet to listen to.

This really started to see limitations once I expanded the list beyond music. If you smash this template against books, where band names are now authors, and you’re trying to read widely as you can, you get this unparsable fucking thing:

You may notice that those names are alphabetical. I did that manually.

After I while I realised this was massively unhelpful for seeing, at a glance, what I was actually in the middle of and what I wanted to prioritise. That resulted in a second spreadsheet, with the idea of this older one becoming a backlog-slash-database. That new spreadsheet had a list of what I was currently on, everything in-progress, and things for the future. But, wanting all that information on one screen, I broke spreadsheet convention again and had what should have been three separate sheets all on one. That meant if I wanted to sort anything by anything, I’d have to manually select tables, manually go through dropdown menus, and hope I sort the right columns in the right order. I eventually made a macro for that, which broke constantly.

You might be reading this and thinking: “Wow, how did you work with any of this?”

I don’t know.

So when I made another note that I should update what I’m reading and watching and when, I immediately hit a roadblock of not wanting to deal with this fucking thing. I then thought, goddamnit, I’m sure someone’s made software out there that hits at least half of my needs for this.

I’ve been quite resistant to out-of-the-box “productivity apps” for a few reasons. Pretty much all of them are hardcoded into one guy’s way of thinking. I am not that guy. There’s only one of that guy on Earth and that app will be perfect for him and no-one else. There’s parts that will work well enough for me, sure, but half my time would be spent getting annoyed at why it doesn’t try to think how I think.

My introduction to such systems came from bullet journaling. Specifically, bullet journaling as you see it on its subreddit and Instagram. You know, full colour spreads, rendered drawings, information taking up a fraction of the page at best, fifty felt tip pens… And I hated it. I was tracking things I had no desire to track, and my setup for ✨weekly spreads✨ could take upwards of an hour. The only reason I stuck with it was that, although annoying to deal with, it was a significant step up over not planning anything.

It wasn’t until a good while later that I discovered the “true” way of bullet journaling. There’s a book for it, but you can learn the whole thing from one video the creator put out. You don’t need to watch it, but, the key thing it emphasises is giving you a set of tools and adjusting the system for you. In my journal, I have weekly spreads so I can look ahead and plan for the short-term future; day-by-day spreads don’t work well for me. In the original system, that’s encouraged, as is reconsidering how and why you’re doing something if it isn’t helping you out. Compared to my first introduction, it completely re-wired how I thought about systems like this.²

I think re-realising that was what finally made me look for alternatives for the media list, because the spreadsheets were just dogshit. A few searches later, I found something called Anytype. This, strictly, isn’t a productivity app in itself, and is instead a framework for building your own vaults similar to something like Notion.

It took more than a minute for me to get my head around, but I ended up really liking how it works. There’s three types of Things you can make, which are objects, collections, and queries. Objects are generic and can be literally anything. A page, a tasklist, a contact, or an object you define yourself, such as a music album or a novel or etcetera etcetera. They then have properties, also definable, with a handful of data validation. The nice part is that since everything is considered objects, no matter how much the usage of it diverges, it’s very easy to share properties across them; there’s no 50 different kinds of “author” category to sort through.

Collections are, shockingly, collections of objects. And, importantly, collections are objects themselves. That means you can have a collection of collections, or, in media terms, a TV series that’s a collection of TV seasons. Or maybe a collection of every movie from a director you want to check out. Collections can then hold both other collections and objects side-by-side, which lets you mix-match searches quite happily.

The final one, queries, lets you sort and filter your stuff. For me, I’ve got a query showing everything that’s currently in progress, one for everything I need to check out for work, and then separate queries for music because my god, it turns out I have a fuckload of music.

Beyond liking how its set up, and enjoying having full control of the systems I make, I’ve stuck with it for a few more reasons:

• Vaults are saved to the actual machine, and if you don’t want to use Anytype’s servers, you can just P2P it to other devices over a local network. I don’t, but the option for that is really nice.

• It’s open source, so even if the company behind it does a heel-turn, a fork will more than likely rise to replace it.

• I don’t intend to fully de-google myself in the near future, but having one more thing no longer tied to it gives me some peace of mind.

• Anytype’s “AI integration” is the API being open, then leaving a note that you can use that to integrate AI apps on your own, which is probably the funniest way to keep investors happy I’ve seen so far.

Did it take my entire weekend to fully set up a system tailor-made to me and copy over every single piece of media I own or wish to engage with? Yes. Do I think it was worth it? Also yes.

Let’s say, I’m out one day, and grab a second hand book in a spur of the moment. In the old case, I had to: 

• Open the spreadsheet on my phone

• Breathe a sigh of relief if it’s an author I’ve already logged

• Add a new row below the author’s name

• Clear formatting so the background is white because it always took the author’s background colour when adding a new row

• Add the book name

• Hope that conditional formatting for the status wasn’t broken

• If broken (often), try fixing conditional formatting through about 5 sub-menus

• If the author wasn’t logged, copy another author’s styling, on a phone

• Try adding blank rows on a spreadsheet, on a phone

• Fix the styling for the author’s name and book name, on a phone

• Have you ever edited a spreadsheet on a phone?

• Oh fuck me now I have to try wranging the other spreadsheet if I start reading it right now

This resulted in me not updating shit, and the backlog would be months out of date. I, in effect, had three different media lists going, of the “real” one in the spreadsheet, a digital one of what folders and files are on my harddrive, and a mental one made of an approximate memory of what’s physically on my bookshelf.

Now, I:

• Open Anytype 

• Add a new novel object

• Add the info in pre-made fields

And that’s it. Anytype handles everything else for me.

Even with the extra legwork to get it up and running, my god, this is so much nicer to work with. It encourages me to update as I go. I’m actually excited to! I gave it a phone-centred stress test by adding in the rest of the books I’ve bought recently, and it worked pretty much flawlessly for my purposes.

There are still bits of friction I wish I could remove entirely. One is that I wish new objects in collections could have values input as they’re made (ie, series order automatically adds 1 for the first, 2 for the second, and so on). That said, that friction isn’t enough for me to want to abandon the system wholesale, and certainly far less than I was experiencing with the old one.

Friction in general was something I was thinking about a lot while doing this. In that, I actually like doing some stuff manually. In my case, I have two collections called “Current” and “Future”. These are media I’ve hand-picked as, in effect, an override to my own priority system, and stuff I’ve bookmarked for the future rather than fishing through the entire backlog for something new. One thing, of course, is that there’s no real way to automate something like that, but I also quite like physically³ removing things off a list once they’re done. There’s changing something from “in progress” to “complete”, sure, but that’s all churned through on the computer’s end in queries.

I don’t think that’s something you’ll be told directly in a commercial system. That there can⁴ be sore points, and not a Perfect System to fully automate yourself into never thinking again, because there’s actually a bit of joy in a bit of pain. It’s very hard to sell non-instant gratification.

And circling back, again, to the idea of shaping systems around yourself, there are absolutely things in here that someone else would despise. Things I’m explicitly not tracking or information I don’t bother searching for.

An example, on music albums, I don’t include their order of release, because I think that’s a hassle. The reason I feel this is a hassle: I already take the time to meticulously tag all my music files as a full collection on my harddrive. To me, that work is already done, and where I’ll actually use that information is when I’ve got foobar2k open. In Anytype, the only thing I’m bothering to track is if I have or haven’t listened to something, or saving a band to check out later. I don’t care if the albums are out of order in here.

However, for book series, I do include release order. The reason: I don’t have that information anywhere else. If my internet was down, and I wanted to find out an album’s release order, I would open foobar2k. If I wanted to find a book’s release order, I’d open Anytype.

There’s also the big question hovering over this entire thing: why bother? Why go through all this effort just to watch TV? I can go on and on about how nice it is for all my in-progress media to be automatically sorted by priority, but, why bother? What’s stopping me from just cracking open a random book on my shelf and just reading the damn thing, rather than fretting about if it is or isn’t my current priority or there’s twenty books in the queue ahead of it? I’m fully aware that I could live quite happily without having this system at all, as many do.

That, however, butts up against me being a power user and ADHD-adjacent control freak. It’s a partial thing of wanting to know everything about everything and getting excited over data sets, but mostly that if I didn’t check myself to this degree I wouldn’t get anything done. If I have a choice between two books, have no reference for if this was a recommendation or something I loaned from a friend, have no reference for how many books I might be reading next, I then do nothing. I need systems like this so I can function. That even extends to the point of having “fun”, where I often have to put down a note in my journal to play a game, and what game, or I will simply forget to have hobbies.

While also realising this post probably just reads like a covert advert for Anytype, it’s not even something I can recommend to everyone reading this. It’s brilliant for what I want to do, but someone else may get completely thrown by the objects system and wonder what the hell I’m raving about. And that’s a good thing. I wouldn’t get anything out of screaming and crying that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Productivity System that I tailored specifically for me isn’t used by everyone else. Even though there’s people who absolutely will evangelise Zettelkasten or PARA or whatever the fuck was a best seller in Waterstones last week.

There will never be a perfect productivity system for everyone. The best you’ll get is something like bullet journaling, which tells you to sit with it and figure out what you actually need. That’s going to take time, fuckups, realising why you’re doing what you’re doing, perhaps abandoning tracking all together, and doing all that until you land on something that actually works for you, because no-one’s brain is the same as anyone else’s.

Or just make a default note apps checklist. What do I know?