I rail about planning and estimation these days. Process is important, and most planning processes feel poorly done and like a waste!

Hopefully i can sus out whatever is bugging me about all this - I'm sure i sound jaded and annoying, so being able to articulate it better is a goal.

A related idea is that we should focus more on review than on planning - it's more important and should provide all the material we need for planning anyway. Instead, most planning tends to be made up on the spot.

Estimation is also made up on the spot. We just 'ballpark' it, but it's never been clear to me what the point of that is. I'd rather say, everyone think about estimates for these 5 things, come back with thoughts tomorrow - then the next day we look at subtasks with itemized work and estimates for those. Some tasks would be better as a spike/jam to hash out a quick version, then we decide how much to invest in each part of the design (the tests, the implementation, reusable portions, cleaning up related tech debt).

• For a briefer overview of Yodo, see: yodo, the application.

A place to link to other entry-point cards.

I'm starting to find more and more tools fitting the second brain/note management concept, which pulls them into the same ballpark as Yodo, hence my interest.

• Roam
• org-roam
• Obsidian.md
• Zim
• Foam
• TiddlyWiki
• The Archive

• Super Productivity

• Ness Labs, you and your mind garden

When it's time to be productive, and I'm juggling multiple projects, what I want is to easily choose which thread to pull on. Which project can I move the needle on?

This question has no answer without more information. So what is next? list all the todos per project? Maybe projects have epics? Maybe the todos are prioritized, and blockers are called out, and I can just pick a project and go down the list.

In Yodo, for a time I had an epic domain object, and todos only existed within epics. Until that didn't make sense, and I supported project-level todos too. At some point I decided epics weren't worth it - all I really needed was a tag to connect the related todos. This has freed thinking quite a bit - by now I'm not really using projects to group todos anymore either - projects have falled to the same just-a-tag solution, which now allows for todos to belong to multiple projects at once.

Now, what are "threads of work"? To me, it's a roughly ordered list of todos. These todos should advance the same feature, provide fixes to the same problem, or result in related research into a specific area. They might result in a first draft of a comic, or lead to the publishing of a blog post or git repository. Perhaps they are tied to a deadline or goal, or for whatever reason, they just belong in the same thread.

One thing I'm realizing in writing this is that my desire to choose which thread to pull on is roughly that I want to choose which goal to make progress on. But I need to be careful - I want the unit of thread to be a todo, and hopefully they are simple to work with and express.

I've been playing Void Bastards lately, and one thing I'm thinking is that the UI or visual for these threads might be expressible as a talent tree, or the way the Void Bastards' Workbench is used.

Each set of upgrades is connected to related items as a line and dot. Maybe Yodo 's todos can be expressed this way? Maybe whole threads can be prioritized against each other, or selected from any morning?

Perhaps these are just goals?

A space to think, hopefully to inform decisions around the yodo resurrection that's happening for me right now via clawe and doctor.

• planning and estimation
• estimates should be versioned
• re-estimation should be normal