Each day at work, I create a simple text file, that is basically my notebook. And each day the file has a name of YYYYMMDD.txt and contains the following format:
TODO: - Task 1 - Task 2 - Task 3 ACHIEVEMENTS: - Achievement 1 - Achievement 2 - Achievement 3 NOTES: - whatever my daily notes are, typically related to the above sections
I purposely try to limit the todo’s and the achievements to one line or 80 characters. I leave each file open (sometimes weeks) until each of the TODO tasks have been completed, noted by a “[ done MM/DD ]” notation at the end of the line. Then if I ever want to get more details on what I actually did, I can open the appropriate date file or use grep to find potential matching files.
Now, Twitter asks one simple question: “What are you doing?” and you theoretically should answer with a single tweet of 140 characters or less.
For the most part, the NOTES section contains answers to “What are you doing?”
What if twitter was extended into a TODO list manager that asked 2 more questions “What are you going to do?” and “What have you done” and created a way to link between the different questions, for both the individual and social network style for others to compare tasks and notes?
The urls could even be simple:
todo: http://www.twitter.com/andrewwatts/todo
achievements: http://www.twitter.com/andrewwatts/done
notes: http://www.twitter.com/andrewwatts
Useful or Not? does that make twitter too complex? I don’t know but I would try it out.
