Creating a Burner List in Things
Published about 1 year ago • 2 min read
Adapting Jake Knapp's Burner List to work with Things' Today list.
Howdy yo! Happy New Year everyone! It's time for resolutions and all that jazz, so here's a little productivity thing I've been doing lately. I've been a huge proponent of Getting Things Done for a long time. I used OmniFocus for years to manage my tasks, but in 2019, I switched back to Things . I also read Make Time , which led me to the idea of the Burner List.
The Burner List is essentially a way to focus on 1–2 projects per day, with space for incidentals that pop up along the way. You have a front burner for your main project, a back burner for another less important project, and then a kitchen sink to hold all the other shit you need to get done. Jake Knapp's original blog post outlined a paper-based way of doing this, but I wanted to do it with Things.
Simply put, I use Things' tags and Today list to keep these organized. Each morning, I go to the Today list, and I assign Front Burner, Back Burner, and Kitchen Sink tags to everything I want to get done that day. Sadly, Things doesn't allow for sorting by tag, so you're on your own if you want to put them in order. I find filtering by tag to be okay.
One issue I ran into was that those tags would stick with my tasks the following day, which wasn't always what I wanted. I whipped up a little AppleScript (JXA-syntax) to help clear them out each morning. I run the following script each morning using a launch daemon.
var app = Application("Things3");
var todos = app.lists.whose({ name: "Today" }).toDos()[0];
var tagsToRemove = ["Kitchen Sink", "Front Burner", "Back Burner"];
todos.forEach((todo) => {
var tags = todos[0].tagNames().split(", ");
todo.tagNames = tags.filter((tag) => !tagsToRemove.includes(tag)).join(", ");
});
So, if you're looking to simplify your task wrangling, the Burner List is a straight-forward way of doing so. Hit me up on Twitter if you have any comments or questions.