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?

1. 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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