I made my own to-do list app
Plus fun shows coming up
Est. Read Time: 4 minutes. Read Time brought to you once again by the Ashburton Energy + Hair Logistics Group, in association with the Bradley Hills Bureau of Corrections + Housing.
New to the SternJourn? It’s a place where Julian (me) promotes shows; and talks about comedy, writing, productivity, and whatever the hell else he [I] want(s). Check out the best of 2024, 2022, 2021, or 2020 [I’ll get around to a best of 2023 at some point]!
SHOWS
[San Diego, CA] Roast of Cupid - Sun Feb. 16, 1p.m.
[Covina, CA] Chatterbox - Sun Feb. 16, 8 p.m.
[Santa Monica, CA] I Gotta Crow - Sat Feb. 22
[San Diego, CA] **HEADLINING** Margaret Star’s Musical Comedy Show at MicDrop San Diego - Clairemont neighborhood - Thurs April 3
[San Diego, CA] TBD - North Park - April 16
[Future Shows] Fill out this form to lemme know what city you’re in if you wanna see me perform there! Takes 5 seconds! Helps me make my grand plans!
***I’m in a hurry, apologies if there are extra typos***
Hiya Sternal Journalists,
Apologies for arriving a day late this week, but I thought everyone might need some time to recover from Kendrick’s scathing halftime show, which I loved and I think might have been the meanest thing anyone has ever done.
I have no hot Super Bowl takes because I don’t know anything about sports, and I’m in the maybe 30th percentile of people who have any reason to weigh in on the halftime show (although I was able to be of service as the person who explained DJ Mustard to a friend sitting next to me. “That’s DJ Mustard. He’s the guy Kendrick says MUSTRRRRRD about. He is prolific and my favorite fact about him is that his real name is Dijon.”).
But what I do have is another installment in Julian’s Hectic Productivity Adventures. If you’re new to the Sternal Journal, about 20% of the time here is spent with my sharing the systems I’ve used to try to corral my creativity into some sort of reasonable output. Some of them I’ve found, some of them I’ve made up. But for the first time ever, I’ve made up one that you can use yourself without any added work!
The problem I was trying to solve: I like to-do lists, but they overwhelm me. Writing stuff down is great, but eventually I have big list of shit that I get decision paralysis about how to handle.
The thing I knew was helpful: I read the Cal Newport book Slow Productivity over the summer, and modified a method he uses to not get too distracted by too many projects. Basically, I have an *active* to-do list of just 3 things that I’m working on getting done. Then I have a “holding tank” (Newport’s terminology) of all the other shit I wanted to get done, but I don’t want distracting while I’m focusing on getting these three things done.
What I made: a little web app called “Resolve.” (I used Claude because I don’t know anything about programming. If you have thoughts about the ethics of this, I’m all ears!) You can click that hyperlink right there and start playing with it, but if you want to know, it looks like this:
It only lets you input three items into your main to-do list. You tag each of your tasks with a length (micro, short, medium, long) and category (work, passions, self, others).
Any tasks beyond the initial automatically go to the “holding tank” list, which you can view if you absolutely need to, but that’s not the point. Because if you really don’t want to do something on your 3-item to-do list, you can just mark it as unresolved, send it to the holding tank, and voila, it is replaced by an item from the holding tank. You can choose whether to replace items with similar lengths, similar categories, or just random. If you dismiss an item more than once, it goes to the “not right now” list which basically helps you not get distracted by the stuff you’re really trying to put off.
This is for single-use task binges, and as such, it totally resets if you refresh the page. But that’s okay because you don’t NEED more tabs! Sometimes you just wanna crank a to-do list without having to think about which thing to do next.
It’s very much a beta thing, but if you give it a whirl, lemme know what you think! Also, there’s a slightly more in-depth How To on the page itself.
Okay, that’s all for this week! Let’s get to some recs!
Recommendations!
Squid Game Season 2. Television Show. I really liked it, expept for the fact that it is very much a Part 1 of a two-part story. If you’re not dying to watch it, I’d wait until June when you’ll be able to watch it all the way through to the end of the series after Season 3 drops. But even so, I liked it a lot. It was different enough and I kept saying, “I better get a [blank] in that [blank blank blank]” and I did! So I’m happy
Strava. App. This is less of a rec and more of a letting people know I’m on Strava now. Some old friends bugged me to do it and it’s very cool because one of these friends is very off social media and bad at texting, so it’s a thrill that I have found the app he uses all the time and I can bug him and talk to him whenever I want to now. I guess, if anything, the recommendation here is meeting your old friends wherever they are.
Foo Chow Restaurant. Restaurant. I’ve never actually eaten here, but it’s a place in LA’s Chinatown which says on the outside, “A Best Seller Movie by Jackie Chan Rush Hour Was Shot Here,” and that sign is one of my favorite things in LA. Here’s me with the sign:
Gotta eat there sometime.
The Robert Rodriguez Ten Minute Film School. Video. I was at my happy place, Barnes and Noble at the Grove last week, and on a whim, I picked up Robert Rodriguez’s Rebel Without a Crew. It’s a classic film bro bible, and I’ve been looking for inspiration in that world. I’ve only read the intro and the Ten Minute Film School epilogue, but I love his writing style and he’s ass-kickingly inspiring. You can watch a video of him giving a version of the Ten Minute Film School speech here. It’s outdated in some ways, but for the most part, the stuff that’s outdated is even easier to do now. Reading this actually probably inspired me to try to make my own app.
Alright! Go out! Have a good week! Make things! Push forward!
Love!
Julian!