How to "do it all" with technology

💭 An ode to the bookmark

The only thing more impressive than the invention of books is the invention of the bookmark.

Can you imagine reading without one? You’d have two choices: Read an entire book in one sitting, or pause and continue on with your life, trying not to forget where you left off. (Yeah, yeah, you could also dog-ear the page…stop ruining my intro!)

If that’s how reading worked, it’d be a lot more stressful, and we’d probably build a whole industry around how to find satisfaction in reading. Society would be in awe of those with the time and dedication to read uninterrupted, and especially those who could juggle multiple books at once.

But of course, that’s not how reading works. In our advanced, bookmark-laden world, you could pause for 50 years — and sure, maybe you’d need to reread a bit, but the whole story would be right there, waiting for you to come back.

So why doesn’t the rest of life work more like reading? Life is stressful, and (surprise, surprise) we’ve built a whole industry around how to find satisfaction in it. Society is in awe of those with the time and dedication to master their craft (cue Olympics theme), and especially those who seem to “do it all”: work, family, athletics, hobbies.

But what if life could have bookmarks? We could put aside one area of life without any shame, and focus more on another, knowing that the first one will still be there when we get back.

What would that actually look like? I think I might’ve figured out.

It’s time to duel

Lacking hobbies is a problem I’ve never had. Do you know how many conversations my parents had to endure where I discovered a new passion and wanted to talk their ear off about it, as if it was my one true purpose in life?

I’ll give you a sense. Here’s a brief list of things I’ve told my parents I want to be:

• Chef

• Rabbi

• Writer

• Luthier

• Linguist

• Founder

• Musician

• Politician

• Professor

• Therapist

• Carpenter

• Watchmaker

• Product manager

• Motivational speaker

And the last one, every early 2000s adolescent boy’s dream: Yu-Gi-Oh! champion.

This is one story my dad will never let me live down.

One weekend, when I must’ve been around 10, he drove me a few hours away to a strip mall where a Yu-Gi-Oh! card game tournament was taking place. He must’ve given up on pushing me towards mainstream hobbies, because he was unusually excited about monsters and spells and traps.

I sat down at the table and played a few duels with some guys who were even older then than I am now. To our collective surprise, I actually won.

As we returned to the car, my dad was ecstatic. “That was amazing! Let’s go to more of these!” he said. “Maybe we finally found your thing!”

That was the last tournament I ever went to. Somehow, hearing my dad say those words ironically sapped all my excitement about the game, and I never competed again.

Put your records on

The main issue with that story isn’t that I lost interest in Yu-Gi-Oh! cards (let’s face it, that was probably for the best) or even that I was a difficult kid to raise. It’s that when I’d lose interest in something, I’d stop doing it forever.

As I’ve gotten older and discovered the power of systems, my interests haven’t gotten any less eclectic, nor have I arbitrarily chosen one career path to the exclusion of others.

Instead, I’ve created a way to visualize all my interests in one place, consciously decide which to pursue at the given moment, and track where I left off with each one so that I can resume or pause them easily. In other words, I’ve invented a bookmark, but for life.

Let me show you how it works…

Step one is writing down all my interests and activities. I did this in Notion, in a database I call “areas.” In the next step I’ll explain why I didn’t just use a basic bullet point list.

I wasn’t kidding when I said my interests are eclectic. Pretty overwhelming, right? Like, how can one person possibly maintain all of these activities?! I wouldn’t fault you for thinking that I’m either faking it or allergic to commitment.

I’ll admit it: Sometimes I worry about the latter, and wonder why I’m not more inherently single-minded. And if the system stopped here, I’d have more cause for concern. But we’re just getting started.

Step two takes advantage of the fact that I listed everything in a Notion database. Doing so allows me to assign properties to each item in the list — like priority and status — and sort and filter according to those.

Once I’ve prioritized the activities based on how important they are to my health, happiness, and career, I can display them like this:

The list is just as long, but now it feels a bit more manageable. As in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, I can tell apart the things that are nice to spend time on (making cocktails) from the practical needs that should come first (tracking expenses).

Next, I can assign a status to each activity, so that I can track which ones I’m actively pursuing (which, for better or worse, doesn’t always align with their priority) and which ones I should shelve for later. Here’s how the database looks when I group by status:

All of this is helpful for showing me at a high level what activities I should focus on. But the obvious next question is, how does that translate into action?

The third and final step is where the magic happens. Here, I link the activities database to my task database, so that I can categorize my to-dos based on their related activity.

The way I designed my system, when I click on any activity in the database, its page opens up to show all the related tasks. For example, here’s what appears when I click on Music Study:

The way I track to-dos, they’re divided into subtasks (what I can do in a day), tasks (what I can do in a week), supertasks (a few weeks to a month), and goals (a few months to a year). So we can see that the Music Study activity has 1 goal, 2 supertasks, 12 tasks, and 3 subtasks associated with it.

What’s so powerful about linking tasks to activities is that it allows me to pause and resume long-term projects without losing my place. I can see exactly what I’ve completed and what’s up next.

Studying music is a good example of this.

In high school, I wanted to learn to DJ, so I bought the necessary hardware and started to watch instructional videos. In college, I was too scared to perform in front of people, so I put the activity on hold. Then, a few months ago, I was visiting home and found my old DJ controller in a closet. In the moment, I was newly energized, but I also knew it was a matter of time before life got in the way again.

So I harnessed that motivation to write down a specific to-do list for how to get back into DJing when the time was right. If I click on “Learn to DJ and make beats” in the above screenshot, I can see that to-do list under “Related Tasks.”

With this list clearly written and easily accessible, I could go back to my routine without either dismissing my interest in DJing as an impractical fantasy or forcing it into my life when it doesn’t really fit. And all the other activities in the database work the same way.

Doing it all, just not all at once

Just like a bookmark keeps track of my reading progress so I don’t have to, my combined task manager + areas database keeps track of my progress on all the other activities I enjoy. That way, when I say I want to be a chef and a musician and a linguist, it’s all true — just maybe not at the same time.

The reason I love this system is that it allows my emotions and rationality to work together to the benefit of both. I can embrace my natural curiosity and explore new interests as they arise, but I can also ruthlessly prioritize and make tangible progress in whatever areas matter most at a given moment. I don’t have to choose between passionate and disorganized, or robotic and systematic. It’s another example of technology doing what it does best so that I can enjoy the rest.

Thank you for reading, as always. Want to use my task manager? Here’s a free Notion template! And if you want to copy my “areas” database, reply to this email and I’ll send more info.