The die that started Diende
Many years ago, I was the sole developer at a company. I was working in a specialised area that I had a lot of experience in, and I had a lot of tasks to do that were all roughly equal priority.
So I came up with a system that eventually became Diende.
I wrote down all my tasks and randomly selected which one to work on next. To get a random number, I used a six-sided die.
Now, this is where it got interesting.
To keep things simple, I would pick from my top six tasks because the die had six sides.
Sometimes I had more than six tasks to choose from, so I had to decide what the six most important things were. In that process, I would often discover that one task actually was more important than the others — so I'd just work on that instead.
Other times, I would only have five tasks. When trying to come up with a sixth, I'd sometimes think of something innovative that would, say, make some of the other tasks easier to accomplish. It could be something I would never have thought of if I'd just had a normal to-do list to work through.
And this is the core of Diende.
The app has come a long way since then, but this idea is still at the heart of it, and it's something I use every day.