Jamie Thingelstad

I suppose I’m a “list person”. Although I would say I’m a GTD practitioner. I like the sound of that better. And my lists, or GTD system, is managed with OmniFocus. Since my Omni Show appearance I’ve had several email exchanges with fellow “list people” about how I structure my lists. I thought I would share a more complete view.

Before getting to the lists themselves a comment. The structure that I have in my system, “the stuff” as it were, the things to do and how I organize them, is fluid. I don’t change tools often but the content and structure I refactor when it suits me. With that said though, these top level folders for my lists have endured in largely this structure for a decade.

They have endured because they are specifically aligned around dimensions of my life. If the dimensions of my life change then these would change. But really this big picture stuff doesn’t change frequently. Also note that these folders may at times have only a couple projects, which may be a signal to me that I should be doing more there.

In OmniFocus these dimensions or groups are stored as folders, and these folders contain projects. You could use this structure in most any list manager.

• Tasks: Contrary to the sentence directly above, this is a project and not a folder. It is the only project I have at the top level. This is my generic bucket of action items that are specifically not a project and should move through my system quickly. Examples could include “Get groceries”, “Call about electric bill”, or “Schedule coffee with Jim”.
• Self: Projects that are specifically about me. Two notable projects in here are “Personal Routines” and “Technology Routines”. I use projects like this for repeating tasks like “Schedule a haircut” or “Do blog gardening”. In OmniFocus these are single-action projects that never complete.
• Family: Projects regarding our family. These can be things like “Labor Day Weekend at the Cabin”, “Celebrate Tammy’s Birthday”, or “Send Christmas Cards”.
• SPS: Here is everything about me being CTO at SPS Commerce. There are a lot of projects here and subfolders for different aspects of that dimension.
• Professional: This is for projects about me being a CTO but not about SPS. For example, I’m a board member at Air T. If I’m speaking at a community event that would go in here. It is “everything else” about me as a CTO.
• Home: Projects about our home. The anchor project here is “Maintain Home” which contains recurring tasks about, you guessed it, maintaining the home. And then there are various projects for things we do. A project that will show up in here soon via a template is “Prepare home for winter”.
• Cabin: Same as above, but for our cabin. Notably, if we are entertaining a group at our cabin on a weekend I create that as a project in Family, not in Cabin. This is about the Cabin.
• Travel: This is the newest folder I have and it has projects for trips that we take. I have templates that I’m regularly improving to populate these since I tend to forget things, or worry I did. I may have a project in here a year before we go and is a fun way to group things for those upcoming travel events. I’m still completing a couple of tasks for “Vacation to Ireland” that we did in June.
• Financial: Projects related to managing finances. Every year this is going to get a “Prepare taxes” project, again built off of a template. I have a “Teach kids about the markets” project in there now.
• Social: Projects that are about giving back. I’m on the MnTech board and I put that activity here. We also hold our annual Things 4 Good candle sale supporting non-profits and that project goes in here.
• Hobbies: Projects for my hobbies. This one does have three notable subfolders: Reading, Weekly Thing, Websites. I currently am wrapping up a project here for “Help Josh with website” that I used to get Rambling Josh setup for my cousin.

Those are my “working” folders and projects. I do have three more folders that are a little different.

• Ticklers: Used for lists to remind me about things, or nudge me. One example I have in here is a project for “Use Gift Certificates, Credits” that gets an entry for any of those I’ve received so I don’t forget. I’ve got a task in there now with a due date to use a credit I got from a store. I also have a very special “Repeating Projects” project here that has single actions on a repeating schedule to create projects. Examples include “Create project for Pi Day”, “Create project to winterize house”, and “Create project to adjust clocks for DST”. These usually have links in the notes to go to Drafts and open that template, or to a Shortcut that creates the project itself.
• Someday, Maybe: Someday lists are powerful, especially for folks that have more ideas than time which is probably more common than not. I wasn’t sure how to structure these though so that the reviews made sense. I finally came upon the idea of having a separate Someday, Maybe list for each folder above. So this folder contains 10 single-action projects, all paused, for each of those.
• Lists: This folder contains my general reference lists. Nothing in this folder is actionable and never has tags. Things don’t get completed in these projects, they instead would get moved or copied somewhere else. This includes projects like “Books to consider”, “Shows to watch”, “Restaurants to go to”, and “Questions for Doctor”.

That is all of it! This structure has served me well for a while now and maybe you’ll get some value out of it as well.