Signal vs. Noise and TickTick for task management

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Podcast—#566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities - The Tim Ferriss ShowFantastic episode of the Tim Ferriss show. Many great concepts and ideas to take in from John List.

Podcast—#260 – Georges St-Pierre, John Danaher & Gordon Ryan: The Greatest of All Time - Lex Fridman PodcastLex talks to two fighters and a coach. Incredibly interesting episode with many great takeaways.

Signal vs. Noise

Signal is what matters. Noise is just that: filler, distractions, what doesn't move the needle.

Focusing on the signal is essential.But most in the world is noise.So how do you hone in on the signal?

General heuristics for finding signal

In the bolded main bullet, I write the heuristics. In the subpoints, I give examples of what follows from them.

• If it isn't relevant in 1 year, it isn't now.

  • Don't follow the news. If it's relevant, it'll find its way to you.

• Curate your sources of information, but make room for serendipity.

  • Make curated feeds, e.g., twitter lists, for topics you are interested in. Then you'll see only what you want to see.

  • Block ads.

  • Unsubscribe from newsletters you were automatically subscribed to.

  • Immediately filter out anything you don't care about.

  • Why make room for serendipity? How do you know that you aren't at the local maxima for information curation? You don't, which is why you make room for serendipity: you allow for a bit of randomness in the system. This may be through curators or self-exploration—making time to explore once in a while.

    • As Amos Tversky said: "The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours."

• Leverage tools for capturing information for later.

  • Much of what you stumble upon online seems very important and pressing to read in the moment. By adding it to a read-later system, the novelty period wears off, so you are better suited to judge whether consuming it is worth it.

  • My system: How I Process Inputs From the Internet.

• Finding signal requires you know what to look for.

  • If you don't know what constitutes signal, you cannot discern it from noise. Therefore, you need to carefully define what you are focusing on, so you can know what you should not focus on.

  • This lets you be aware of Opportunity Cost. If you know what you should focus on, you know what in that area moves the needle the most. Therefore, you can also classify the low ROI activities or things as noise, in comparison to the high ROI activities or things.

First thoughts on TickTick

I started experimenting with TickTick for task management recently.I'm loving it so far. It fixes many of the issues I had with Todoist.

Here are my first thoughts.

Pros

• Calendar support (!) as it helps me timebox and set times for tasks

• Support for emojis in lists... oddly satisfying 🤠

• Habits (!), which is a super useful feature for tracking habits. Big plus for me.

• Various views to help get an overview of tasks (timeline, calendar, Eisenhower, kanban)

• Great capture feature (but that's not uncommon)

• Better statistics than Todoist

• Focus timer: inbuilt Pomodoro for your tasks

  • You can estimate tasks in poms, which is great for getting an overview of your workload on any given day.

• Smart lists are pretty cool

• Great filtering

• Actual task templates

• Very fast and overall good sync feature. Switching between devices is very seamless.

• You can actually see what you did (tasks completed) on previous days.

• Good note support for tasks

  • Actually has a whole inbuilt note system

• Seemingly quick support. I sent a feature request and got a response within a few hours. Sure, it was a pretty trivial case, but I was happy to get such a prompt response.

Cons

• Little nesting support for lists, which required a bit of a paradigm shift for me. Not necessarily bad, just different.

• Weird to use ^ and ~ for smart-parsing which list to add a task to in capture. Feels like Todoist got this very right.

• Many features also means more to learn. Not a negative for me at all, but something to be aware of. It can be used for basic tasks management with basically no effort, though.

Overall, I think it's a great tool.The web-app, desktop (windows), and mobile (iOS) applications are all very good.I bought Premium quite quickly, and haven't had a shred of regret. The pricing is comparable to Todoist.

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