IT Enthusiast — How I keep my programmer’s ToDo notes

How I keep my programmer’s ToDo notes

At some point I’ve found it is good to keep my personal ToDo notes about any coding I do - either my personal projects, or some exercises, even Coursera courses I take.

The main idea is that often I get some thought when I could not immediately start working on it…

For example I’ve heard about interesting programming puzzle. Or I read about some SEO improvement which I can apply to my site. Sometimes such ideas need further consideration (and perhaps they never will be implemented) but it is good to write them down somewhere.

And when the time comes that I have some free time and can’t remember about anything urgent to do, I just open my ToDo list and at once find several things I can do. I choose one or more depending on how many time I have - and in a hour or two I close the issue.

This looked like just minor time-management optimization for me at first, but as the task list grows I understand it is quite valuable thing. Really, some notes may hang here for almost a year waiting when I come up with solution for them.

How to keep them? There are many ways and many tools. I prefer them be accessible over internet, so I can add notes either from work or from home, or from my mobile. I choose GitHub for it. Just created an empty project in my account (we may call it ToDo for example) and start adding issues here.

Notes for certain large side-project could be grouped at separate tracker (separate github project) of course. At the picture above you can see how issue tracker for my CodeAbbey site looks like right now.

So if you still do not keep notes - why not start right now? Login to github, create your todo list and fill it with first five records. Visit it every day and spend five minutes thinking is there anything to add, or could one of existing tasks be solved today… Hope you will find it useful yourself :)