What’s On Your To-Do List?
I keep a list of things I want to do for KDO in Apple Notes, organized into four sections: small, medium, large, and longshots/obsolete. This note contains tweaks, bug fixes, code refactoring, new site features, roadmap items,1 infrastructure migrations, potential project ideas, vague prompts, and even things I don’t want to do but should maybe consider doing anyway at some point. I keep already-completed items on the list so progress can be gauged, noticed, and appreciated.
I was looking at the list today, and thought I’d share some of the items with you:
- Reposting social posts (in comment threads) for members
- Do a podcast
- Publish posts to Instagram. (How?)
- Implement site-wide search
- Make newsletter daily?
- Write a book based on kottke.org
- Sell Blue Line Air Express t-shirts
- Build a Substack competitor
- Make a gift link search engine
Some of these are partly finished or would take very little to implement if I wanted. Some will never happen. Weirdly, some of the projects and site tweaks I most want to make aren’t even on my list. They live only in my head and I mull them over in the shower or while walking until they’re “done” enough to start working on. I guess maybe ideas don’t go on the list unless they’re not that urgent or interesting.
Do you have to-do lists for your creative projects? Care to share an item or two with the group?
Insofar as KDO has a roadmap, which is somewhere between “not at all” and “a general direction into the murky haze of a possible future”. I play things by ear a lot. ↩
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I'm learning music composition as a hobby and have so many pieces that are evolving along. My ultimate to-do is to make them into an album. Conventional wisdom is to just push things out, learn by doing it imperfectly a bunch of times, but I dunno... not trying to overthink it, but I want it to be awesome! Not a permanent to-do, but a persistent one for a while.
Site-wide search would be genius
Buy a book based on kottke.org
Figuring out what to do with my life. That is very broad and intimidating.
Finish the Wordpress site I've owed my wife for years, now (delays due to many things + procrastination), freeing myself to try to work on other more interesting (to me) projects.
as far as Kottke.org goes, I'd like to see it involved in "Textcasting" (Dave Winer term) which intends to let people write using the tools they like, but publish everywhere. It could be done "easily" with RSS but getting buy-in from social media people who get funding via engagement will be an uphill battle.
Turn my 3 season porch into 4 season office/relaxing space. But really, make enough money to pay someone to do it for me.
I have been wanting to get back into working with stained glass.. step one was clearing off my worktable... next is Decide on a Pattern, but I hate what I'm finding... so next is actually CREATE a design... I think looking at what glass I have on hand should dictate what I make as I build my skills again
I would LOVE you to write a book, Jason!
Re: writing a book, you should read “You Should Write a Book” (currently out of print but you can contact the authors or find it online).
My creative endeavors are too chaotic to be constrained to a list. I'm more of a bottom-up thinker, and I don't have an ounce of ambition in my body, so my fibercraft hobbies are just driven by what sounds pleasant to work on at any given time.
I have at least a dozen wips floating around, and some of them will definitely never be finished. Others are samples of a technique I wanted to try, and might someday grow up to be a finished object of some kind, or be unraveled and reused for something else. If I want to work on my bobbin lacemaking tomorrow, my ongoing spinning and weaving and crochet and knitting projects will just have to keep until the whim strikes again.
This is why I buy almost exclusively secondhand materials. I don't want to spend real money on something that might never see the light of day! What motivates my creative endeavors is the accumulation of knowledge and technical skill, not tickboxes. But maybe that's just me and my AuDHD not wanting to waste my limited executive function on my free time!
two items from my to-do list:
- create a real version of "elide". A podcast app I prototyped where "next/fast forward" doesn't move ahead by a set amount of time, but instead skips to where the current speaker finishes talking. The more podcasts I listen to, the more I want this, and no podcast apps have this feature.
- create a website that aggregates upcoming movies and concerts I'd be interested in, local to my area. Let me hide stuff I don't care about and pay attention to what I've liked on letterboxd and the music that I listen to. There's no single place I can easily get this info in one place and all the existing separate sites suck.
I expect to build both of these within the next 3-4 months.
Oooooh, please share that movie/events aggregator when you build it, that sounds amazing! I don't assume you're taking requests, but my own wish list would include events for certain teams or sports.
A friend of mine just built something similar that aggregates all upcoming movie events in Austin. https://onesheet.page/austin/
I have a large collection of essays that are essentially philosophical and practical life advice that I wrote for my children when they were younger, during a period when I wasn't sure I was going to be available for them as adults.
They're written in Markdown, and I dream of using a static site generator like Hugo to turn them into a website I can share with the world.
My main concern is LLM exposure. It's not really thrilling to think of putting these heartfelt essays out there, which I want to share with people who might find value in them, only to know that LLMs are just going to slurp up what I put out there and regurgitate it in a warped form in prompt responses.
I used to paint in school, all the way through high school (water colors). In College I did physics and computer science and didn't make the time to take any art courses. Now (30 years later) I want to learn how to paint in oils. For the last 12 months I've had everything setup (the paints, the canvas, the solvents/mixers, etc.) but I still haven't actually done anything because I am too intimidated by the medium I've picked and I haven't had the time to take a class.
It's a mix of procrastinating, being chicken, and just being busy with work. But this is always on the very top my creative to-do list.
My main project is my old house, upkeep and decorating. My todo list includes: rewire a chandelier I got at an estate sale, build garden beds, repair some gutters, and get a new storm door on my porch.
Doing a Kickstarter for a photo book I've been working on for the past three years. First step - finish the video and figure out when to launch.
Build a site that tracks conferences, particularly tech conferences since that's my particular interest. I don't know how to collect the information without a lot of hard labor and/or fighting off spammers if you let people self-submit, which is why I haven't built it. I think you could make decent money by selectively letting conferences promote themselves to interested users. But I'd love to be able to easily search for conferences in a specific region or that cover a specific topic, or to get notified of any new conference that matches my interests.
I bought a vacant house from 1866 (that is very old for where I live) so the list is endless - including hiring someone to remove the bats from the attic- but the main item on my list I'd like to do is build a better competitor to the voter database Democratic candidates, campaigns, and various party organizations use. It is terrible, and is apparently the only one we have. It is one size fits all, and therefore fits nobody, especially for candidate way down ballot. I've been bitching about it for years.
I have started keeping my to do list on stickies on outside of the pantry. I see it all the time AND i have the satisfaction of pealing the completed ones off and adding them to a large stack.
Currently the most creative ones are finishing a floating bookshelf for my room, figuring out how to build doors for the shed i just finished and getting better at social media for my business
This is timely, as I recently spent a few hours reorganizing my creative notes in Upnote. One of the things on my creative to-do list: take one of Jaron Lopez's courses on creating more interesting chords, and sign up for a Seed To Stage course on using Ableton Live.
I'm a lifelong musician and retired early from my day job in spring of '25. I'm having a blast diving into these sorts of rabbit holes even if they threaten to create another type of to-do-list anxiety. ;-)
Thank you for your mention of Upnote. I have been looking for a new note taking app for sometime and this looks like the one!
Yes next up in long line of art /craft/design projects is soil chromatography. It’s science, sure, but they cal look so cool!
Finish clearing out a garage-size rental storage unit (now 40% full) that we filled when we moved houses and downsized four years ago.
How do you eat an elephant?
Answer: One bite at a time.
I know this is not a creative project, but it's an impediment to accomplishing the other creative projects on my to do list.
This is also on my list, so I feel ‘ya on the one bite at a time.
Weirdly enough, one of my current projects is a to-do list app inspired in part by the writing of Oliver Burkeman.
I came back from a trip to Japan a couple of years ago with a lot of ideas about furniture. I bought a lot of beautiful wood that is mostly just sitting in my garage in various states of unfinished. I’d like to clear out that backlog this fall and winter.
Accountability inspiration p0rn right here; I love it.
My priority for this week is to break down two "impossible tasks" (too big, too scary) into doable to-do bits.
(1) Launch an online counterpart (newsletter, community, resource repository) to my in-person grief and end-of-life work
(2) Move to France by spring 2028 and finally live in a country that plans infrastructure around non-drivers
Gulp.
Another "someday" to do that isn't as daunting? Get better at embroidery.
Isah - please share that grief and end-of-life online resource, whenever you get that published! Doesn't have to be perfect, but speaking for myself and countless other randos on the internet, that is so needed.
As for 2, take me with you? ;)
Elizabeth, I'll take all of the encouragement I can get! The to-do list prompt got me zoomed in, and half of my roadmap for launching an online thanatology space has been charted. I'm taking today off from big plans because flu + COVID vaccines hit me harder than I wanted them to. (Lesson one in grief & life: rest when your body demands it.)
Tous les amis sont les bienvenus... même ceux que je n'ai pas encore rencontrés.
I had a Quad Bypass last November, right in the middle of finishing the basement in house. So between my oldest returning from school, and being cleared to do some more physical stuff, I'm dusting off the old list and finally getting it done! With any luck come Christmas ill be enjoying a massive craft room and new living room!
Opening a shop simply means turning one's entire life into a to-do list, but some of the longstanding things I can't quite give up hoping one day to do: a collection of illustrations of every car mentioned in Tom Waits songs, make a typeface based on the lettering in Picasso's Avventyr, more quliting!, run a 10k with my wife on Thanksgiving (easy for her, not for me), design a chose coat, oof now I'm overwhelmed!
I'm guessing you meant "chore coat" and not "chose coat," and your fingers and/or autocorrect made its own plan. Still, my mind is now running wild, dreaming of a coat that helps you make choices! Surely there is a book in there about different coats that help the protagonist with various aspects of adulting?! Will So-and-So put on their pants of financial literacy, scarf of concise speaking skills, or chose coat? (In my brain's outline, you can't wear them all at once; that's too much power.)
@Isah I love this so much! Even just one article might be too much power!
@sampotts — I casually mentioned this autocorrect/typo inspiration to my teenage daughter, and we spent the tram ride to our yearly physicals dreaming up the perfect life skills + clothing article pairing. We even got some of the clinic's staff adding suggestions!
My oh-so-perceptive daughter might have found perfection already with an emotions beanie. Keep it on to hold everything close, the hard and the joyful, but if you start feeling distractingly warm, that's a sign to take it off and let your worries, fears, and/or anger float up. 30 minutes after this suggestion, the kiddo added "And if you see someone with crazy beanie-head hair, with static and all lopsided, you know to ask them if they want to talk about it."
Swoon for youthful clarity.
1. Find and fix all the missing images from my blog that have disappeared with Wordpress migrations.
2. Slice my kids' band rehearsal insanity into samples to make usable audio tracks.
3. Write a book called Become Unmarketable.
I find myself struggling at work and at a crossroads about some other private matters so I'm digging into my creative work to create some balance in my life. Like others above, my to do list is mostly purging junk and making a dedicated space for that creative work that isn't the dining table or piled up next to the couch. There's the drawing practice and the watercolor learning and the oil paints I haven't had time to touch yet as well as the sewing machine I'm just beginning to learn about. Yet, again, as others have pointed out, the more I move forward on my to do list, the longer it seems to get.
Currently top of my to-do list
I am building a new product and for some reason this is the step I got blocked on and had to take a break. It would probably take 30 minutes to do this assuming everything goes right, but if anything goes wrong it's a bunch of troubleshooting. It's just the right amount of trivial/potentially ruinous that I paralyzed me
OHMYGOD Thank you so much for articulating the procrastination cycle that I also feel! I know my nameless task will likely take an hour...unless it goes wrong, then it's 12-24 hours of work. Most days it just feels too daunting to even start.
You all have such ambitious to-do lists. Mine are chores and errands:
My to-do list is on a big flipchart-sized post it in the living room, noting everything we have to do to finish a 3 yr kitchen renovation. (3 yr because layoffs meant saving money by slowly doing it ourselves instead of writing a fat check to someone else more skilled)
Reflecting on this prompt by Jason, though, everything on the list does feel creative, in that my sweetie and I haven't ever done these things before so we're stretching our problem solving skills to figure out how to do - and admittedly sometimes redo - all kinds of things. The list very gradually shrinks, but always includes "smooch" because it reminds us that we're doing all this to keep creating a sanctuary together, slow and imperfect it may be.
Imperfect and slow sanctuaries are better than slick and sterile ones... and more cherished, too!
That's funny that you keep your to-do list so you can gauge progress. I delete things on mine when I do them so I can feel accomplished - and for the satisfaction of trying to keep short lists. My current to-do list though includes funny things that I've noticed to tell M next time I talk to her.
My Notes to-do list is mostly places I read about that I'd like to travel to or random things I thought sounded interesting. I guess I should pick some something creative now that our kids are older and we have some free time.
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