Initially I kept my ToDo in a text file and I'd just delete things when I did them. Nice clean list of what's remaining, but after a few weeks I felt AWFUL, the list grew faster than it shrank, and it felt like I never made headway.
Now I don't delete things. I put a little + at the start of the line for anything I did, a - for anything I decided not to do, and a / for anything I did partially but needs to be revisited. I write a new list each day, carrying-forward items that I feel are worth revisiting.
And what's huge is that I can scroll down and see previous lists, years worth, and read all the stuff I did. It's enormous compared to the remaining todos, and apparently that's psychologically important.
For similar psychological reasons I started keeping detailed notes of everything I did at work, at a time when it felt like I wasn't making any progress anywhere. Just seeing a record of when I helped someone else fix a bug, or all the times I moved the ball just by an inch or so - it really makes a difference.
If I have 50 pages of things I spent time on, I must actually be doing something!
As a scientist, it's best practice to keep a daily notebook called a "lab diary" where you document your work, e.g. details of experiments conducted, day by day.
It is sometimes important to prove when you had a particular idea (e.g. for patenting purposes or copyright lawsuits or documenting the history of a field), and it is important to keep track of the details of experiments in order to be able to reproduce them. For that latter aspect, I recommend self-documenting data nowadays, i.e. data that comes with meta-data to explain how it was derived, such as parameters used to create data in an experiment, which I often encode in POSIX filenames (e.g. <method>-n=<n>-iter=<iter>-k=<k>.eval => "randombaseline-n=20-iter=500-k=3.eval").
Of course you can maintain such a diary in the form of a plain text file, and I often do that as additional companion, but files are editable, you may lose them, and they have not much worth in terms of serving as a proof;
a paper diary with daily entries, in contrast, is telling a story that is less likely to be fake.
It also makes you accountable (in case management asks you what you did on March 3 last year, you'd open your lab diary and could say "that was when we had the meeting where we decided to cancel the XYZ project"), and you can use it to extract achievements for your annual or quarterly performance reviews from it.
I have the same system, todo become done. I also add done things that I didn’t expect/ plan to do. (Life’s curve ball). I also started tracking “what is the worst thing that happened today”. That’s added perspective that I may think I had a bad day, when in fact I got these things done and the worst thing was actually pretty minimal.
> That is a cool approach. One can build an ad-hoc kanban system within Vim this way!
I gotta be honest, I'm slightly horrified that I nodded while reading this comment because I can see how that would work: multiple splits opened with `-O`, then some leader-key shortcuts to move paragraphs up and down within a split, and to move paragraphs left/right to other splits.
At most you need 4x shortcuts - shift paragraph up, down, left, right.
Now I don't delete things. I put a little + at the start of the line for anything I did, a - for anything I decided not to do, and a / for anything I did partially but needs to be revisited. I write a new list each day, carrying-forward items that I feel are worth revisiting.
And what's huge is that I can scroll down and see previous lists, years worth, and read all the stuff I did. It's enormous compared to the remaining todos, and apparently that's psychologically important.