Please mark it as NSFW :)

Not a troll post.

Fair enough. I’ll take your question seriously.

Without any context, it sounds as if everything that you’re perceiving right now is shit. Maybe your relationships are strained and you feel lonely or guilty. Maybe the news hits you harder every day. Maybe money is tight. Maybe you’ve suffered a great loss. Maybe nothing has happened at all and you’re sitting there, contemplating whether life is worth it. I don’t know your situation.

And whatever it is, it’s valid. Heck, I sometimes feel like life is shit.

Now, I’m not here to say we should look at reality with rose-colored glasses or to look at reality with naive optimism. No. I’m here to say that we have a choice. We can choose what to focus on and how to respond to reality.

Is it really true that “everything is shit”? Is the fact that your body has managed, against all odds, to sustain your life shit? Is the fact that humans can grow and change shit? Is the fact that we can be better as people shit?

Still, shit happens. And we have to be ready to accept that. Regardless of how much shit there is, we can always choose how to respond to it.

For one, we play a massive role in our interpretation of shit. There’s solid science behind this. You could look at theories of cognition such as the Theory of Constructed Emotion, Relational Frame Theory, or even the shallow but effective Cognitive Behavioral Therapy frameworks. All of those theories think it’s crucial to notice the lens that you and I are looking at the world through. Not only should we notice the lens, but sometimes we should clean it or direct it elsewhere. Otherwise we spend our whole lives stooped over a pile of crap, when we could stand, look around, and notice the world around us from a different perspective.

But that’s not the only thing that matters. We don’t just want to see the world differently. We also want to live valued lives. Once again, this is possible regardless of how much shit there is. How so? Well, what kind of person do you want to be? A kind person? A person that is reflexive and open minded? A person that notices and appreciates beauty when it appears? A person who is proactive about their future and that of others? A person who is compassionate towards others? A person that’s curious about the world and how to improve it?

It’s not easy, being kind, appreciative, and proactive when you’re bogged down by shit. But you’re not alone. There’s brilliant and insightful people who have dedicated their lives to finding out how to do it. If you’re interested, I’m happy to talk about empirical ways of doing it. For now, it’s more important to ask what the alternative is. Is a life spent stooping over shit a good life?

Depends on whether the team I am in uses Scrum or not.

If the team uses Scrum, everything is on the backlog, so rarely do I need personal lists.

If the team doesn’t use Scrum, then I set up my own personal Scrum board. That way, I can deal better with people coming in and saying “hey, snek_boi, this task that I just thought of is urgent and I need you to drop everything you’re doing and do this now”. With the Scrum board, I can then ask them if what they need me to do is more important than whatever’s on top of my personal backlog, and often they themselves realize their ‘urgent’ task is actually not that urgent.

Since you asked about software, I’ve used Taiga and Notion.

Also, I used to do GTD religiously, but now I mainly use Scrum because it forces me to ruthlessly prioritize. Since you asked about apps, I’ll tell you that when I did GTD, I used Joplin with Syncthing (or some combination of Syncthing and a local notes app). I switched to StandardNotes before stopping doing GTD altogether. Maybe I’ll come back to GTD in the future.

I also almost started Bullet Journaling, buying the journal and all, but a friend of mine was quite depressed and seemed to need it more so I gave it all to him.