People often find the public nature of my blog remarkable. They boggle
at the idea that I put my task list online and that I share my
reflections on my quarter-life crisis.

I share a lot, but this blog doesn't have *everything.* There are a
lot of things I don't write about because I haven't figured them out
yet or because I don't feel like writing about them. I also have quite
a number of stories that I just haven't gotten around to writing!

But yes, my life is mostly public. Why, when I know that Google and
Archive.org will mean that these things will be around for pretty much
forever? ;)

In particular, people find my task list unusual. Sacha Peter said:

… she has taken the step to pretty much put her task lists online for the whole world to see.

He wonders whether it might be interesting to look back over several
years of data. Hmm… Come to think of it, I've been using Planner for
four and a half years now. Whoa.

I use my task list as both a tool for proactive planning, reactive
management, and retrospective reflection. I mainly use it to plan
ahead, get stuff out of my head, and keep track of what I accomplished
for the day. I *could* use Planner to keep track of tasks that I
didn't finish or didn't get around to, and I might change to doing
that one of these days.

I guess the strange thing is that I do this kind of planning out in
public. This has helped me countless times. A public task list lets
people figure out if I remembered that I have a meeting with them.
Sometimes people will remind me of things if they see me
procrastinate. And every so often, people offer tips and suggestions
that help me do my work more effectively.

It's easy to have private tasks. Here's the basic Emacs Lisp code I'd
need for that:

(defun sacha/planner-skip-private ()
  "Remove all lines matching \{\{ private \}\} (no spaces)."
  (goto-char (point-min))
  (delete-matching-lines "\{\{private\}\}"))

I don't think I'll use it often, though. It's kinda nice keeping
people up to date on what I'm working on even if I don't have the time
to write long blog entries…