How to use TICKTICK for Getting Things Done (GTD)

hey everybody lucas here thanks for tuning in today we're going to take a look at tiktik and see how well it can work for us as a tool to practice the getting things done methodology or gtd for short and this is a video i'm especially excited about because tickstick is a tool that i didn't have that high expectations of it's not a tool that's necessarily made for gtd out of the box but because i found it so easy to use i think it just works great and i'm just excited to show you all so let's just dive in and i'll show you why so we are presented here in a interface that i've customized a bit which you can do to your liking under settings so i'm actually going to start there because i feel like this really represents what tiktik is about in many ways it is a very flexible system and you can make it work in any way you wish so this is the settings module for the desktop application that i'm looking at here but you'll find the web version to be very similar one of the things you can change for example is the layout so i prefer dark mode but you can shift easily between any colors and you start seeing it responds very quickly without any lag and that's a recurring theme for this software which is very important for a productivity software that you want to be easy to use so let's shift back to the dark theme and move into some of the features that tiktik has to offer before we dive into the lists and the whole system we've created for one there are smart lists which is a list of pre-made lists i suppose uh that can consist of a specific collection of items i've chosen to hide most of these smart lists because i want to keep it simple and minimal but you can certainly choose any of these most of them are pretty self-explanatory right to show or don't show in your particular system so i did want to make sure that was visible for you all to be aware of before you try it they also have a focus timer which allows you to truly you know focus on a task and engage with it based on the time you've allotted for it which can be super handy if you have a task that might require some more time or just no distractions and there's even a pomodoro timer which is a specific time management method which aligns with gtd uh you know it's independent of it you could say where you work with small breaks in between really worth a try and the way ticktick has set this up is very elegant i must say so there's other settings that i'm not going to go into in too much detail but it was just to show you that there are many options to customize this software to your liking i suppose one thing that is really noteworthy is the ability to have widgets which allows you to position for example your inbox directly on your desktop background and immediately enter items in there without even having to open the application which is pretty rare and it works really well i've tried it with this trial account and it works so that's noteworthy same for templates which aren't necessarily special but it's good to have them and so you can see that it is a very flexible system from the get-go here are the options that i am left with in this particular design what i've chosen to use it starts with the inbox which is great to have available out of the box we don't have to create it separately adding an item is super easy you press enter and it's in there available to process later on the way to process items is by using tags primarily now here you can see that i've created a bunch of them one of which is to indicate a next action so if an item gets this tag it's an item that we can perform from a particular context the context i've created for this demo system you can see here you can create your own and i make sure to always color code these by what they are so that i can keep an overview so that it can remain organized in my system in this case all contacts are light blue time required is organized in a orange fashion agendas and i'll get into this in a moment with an example are colored light green and any reference material is sort of this green yellowish color but you can pick any color you like you can add new text and select a caller for those you can even have parent tags so for even more organization i could do this create a context like main category and then i could group these contacts under there you know by having the context tag as the parent tag so that is all up to you uh you can do that and to process a particular item from the inbox that's exactly what we're gonna use so let's say this is a next action just for illustration purposes we can use the hashtag and then anything we've created already shows up or we can create a new one if that applies then we want to select the context let's imagine this is an errand we gotta run we can select the errands context and let's imagine it takes 30 minutes so we select that tag as well and then we can move it from the inbox to any of these lists that we have available now actionable items go into either the standalone actions list which i've created if they're not related to a project or if they are we can select the project they're associated with for now let's just add it to the standalone actions list now this is great and all but how do we get an overview of every action whether it's related to a project or standalone actions that's where the custom module comes into play which allows us to create smart lists of our own this is super powerful i really like this feature i really like that you know trello has this as well and some other tools that i've reviewed on this channel this is really something that can make your system so much more powerful because it just has this ability to customize it to your liking in this case i kept it simple and i created the office laptop and errands lists and you might wonder well that is just already what we had here with tags right well not exactly because this filters for items that are both next actions as well as next actions that can be performed from the particular context that we've set up so that is the main difference you can set up those tags uh here under the conditions for the smart list in this case we want it to be both next actions and errands and that's the items that will show up you can get even more granular and advanced under the advanced tab if you wish so that is really great to see and this will allow you to see items that are part of this context as well as the next action regardless of project they're related to in fact you can see that the standalone actions and products items are grouped separately so you can even expand or collapse them if you want to work on a particular project first within a context you can also sort for specific things like uh the dates it was added or to be done by title by tag or by priority uh which it also has built in as a kind of uh taxonomy for tasks you can set these up under the settings module and uh you can even add sub tags subtasks i should say uh although i'm not doing that in this particular example priority can be set at the top right so just really straightforward easy to use and very pleasant to use i can also imagine for a gtd or like myself now we see our item that we've created for uh from the inbox it's now moved to the standalone actions list so here we can get a more high level view of the project level and how we're progressing there this is just a standard list though what about projects that might be more complex right they have different phases perhaps or sequential items how do we make those work from a gtd perspective how do we keep the overview let's take a look at an example project so you can actually create folders and group specific projects in those folders which is super handy you might want to do that for areas of focus that you've defined or any other type of categorization really in this case we're imagining that we are a manager at our work and we have an intern to manage and it's time to evaluate their performance so it's time for a performance review now let's imagine that with this company there are specific protocols to follow for the performance review and actions to be completed by both myself as well as others and that's really comes in handy here because that means we can see next actions we can see sequential actions waiting for items agendas and others so i think this is a really nice way to illustrate what ticktick can do for you in this case we're using sections which you can do with uh these uh lists and we break up the project into specific phases uh with these sections so in this case i have two parts related to preparation an execution phase and then three parts related to processing which all follow up in other words every action from the previous phase has to be completed before we can start with the next phase obviously the first phase is how we start that is why these items have been predefined as next actions with their context and also the time they will take already predefined we can open these items from the smart lists we've created here but just for sake of illustration let's imagine that we have completed all of these three items we can mark it and it's done and now we are ready to tackle the items in part two in this case though uh all of these items include things we would be waiting for from our intern so that is why if you haven't done so now is the time to add the waiting for tag and uh if you want to get an overview of everything you're waiting for you just navigate to that very tag and you'll see it from there as well right so that way you can see both from the project level as well as attack level what it is that you're waiting for to stay on top of everything so let's imagine that we've received the answers that we were looking for from our intern to prepare for the review and we've also managed to schedule a time then we move on to execution conduct the performance review and what you see here is that we have defined the context we've also defined the time required for it but we've not yet mapped it as a next action which is exactly what was intended right this is part of a phase that comes after previous phases so it wouldn't have made sense to have it live as a next action already now however that we are done with the previous phases we can add the next action stack very easily as such and now it will show up when we select the office smart list as you can see here so really easy to do uh and uh very intuitive i would say as well as quick uh to see uh on the you know on the desktop or whatever screen you're using it it doesn't take long time to load and that's very important so now we've completed the performance review we can mark that complete and then we move on to the next phase by adding the tag so on and so forth right so i think and hope that you'll start to see how this actually works out and you can create multiple custom tags for these purposes as well like what if i work with my intern very intensively and i wait for multiple things from them i could create a waiting for intern special like custom list here and make sure that it takes items that are both uh labeled with the intern label as well as the waiting for label so you can get really creative here use it to fit with your life essentially then we move on to the tickler file which is pretty straightforward we can just create a new task list called tickler file which i've done set up a reminder give it a due date and then set the reminder on the right bottom corner here and then uh make sure that the reminder is set up it's actually at the top right here sorry not the bottom right and we can select the reminder to show up on any specific time usually it will be on the dates if you said already but it doesn't have to be for some day maybe it's even more simple because even essentially this is just a deferred inbox right items that you want to process at a later time so you can just dump them all in here but you can certainly also create a folder like here and group specific categories of someday maybes uh maybe you know trips to take like a trip to mars why not uh as well as maybe restaurants you want to eat at whatever is relevant to you you can create these specific lists and if you're ready to process them you can move them into the specific list that you've set up that are actionable areas of focus is where you can start to see for the first time a different type of list which is a note list so you can have both task lists which we've seen so far but also note lists that allow you to most basically you know store information not everything is actionable in gtd and and that's totally fine in this case we want to have a definition to reflect and review what are our areas of focus in our lives so let's imagine with a family then we can define the details in the description and revisit it at any particular time if needed maybe if we change our job or anything else change in our life right our areas of focus are relatively constant but they do change as our lives progress so here's where you can revisit those for goals that is where i decided to actually move back into the task view because at some point you have you know you want to complete these goals it they might take a while uh but you know and they're not next action certainly not but you do want to define the goals uh uh in a clear and achievable way here's what i use the sub lists sorry subtasks for in this case let's say with my company i have an objective to hire 10 new interns by july 1st so i can mark that as the main objective while having sub-tasks for any individual intern and i might want to link to specific projects related to hiring that intern in the description uh so you know just use it in a way that works for you but i found it really pleasant to set up a goal in this software as well moving on with the vision which is like areas of focus just a area where you define something to revisit regularly as well as your life purpose which is a pretty big thing but you can certainly store that information here speaking of storing information the same counts for reference which honestly is also possible very well with tiktik because you are able to upload attachments so here i've uploaded my picture as an example you can upload attachments from the specific item itself you can tag those items i chose the id tag here just for illustrations this is to do with my id i suppose but you can store passwords whatever it is honestly right it's all about storing information in a way that works for you so i would recommend grouping those in the reference list or even reference folder with separate lists and using tags to reference and and easily find items that belong to a specific reference area so all in all uh i'm super super impressed with what tictic has created here because it it's not explicitly created for gtd but as you can see it is very easy to make it gtd friendly and so friendly in fact that in my honest opinion it beats out on some pieces of software that have been created for gtd so super excited about using this tool i highly recommend you give it a try if you're still looking for a system of your own link will be in the description if you want to try it out subscribe if you want to see more gtd related content and as always thanks for watching

Channel: Lucas Prigge

Views: 58,105

Keywords: gtd, gtd ticktick, getting things done ticktick, ticktick, ticktick 2021, ticktick tutorial, how to use ticktick

Id: BTjYWvumZ5M

Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 06 2021