IT operations folks strive to not only maximize uptime but also keep systems patched. These might seem like competing goals, but we’re here to help with Live kernel patching in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and enjoy some improvements with live kernel patching in RHEL 8.5.
You can use a built-in tool to get update the kernel on RHEL systems with no downtime. That tool is live kernel patching (kpatch). Kpatch has been a part of our operating system for some time now (since RHEL 8.1, 7.7). However, with RHEL 8.5 (and the 9.0 Beta), there are some significant enhancements.
To catch the rest of my article, head over to the Red Hat blog here!
Way back in the day, humanity created computers to help make our lives easier. In a lot of ways, they have; in others, it’s made life much more tedious, especially for the SysAdmin. What used to be a mainframe has turned into hundreds of servers, containers, and virtual machines spread across data centers, clouds, and even laptops!
Never fear, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is here. Tools like Ansible have been around for over a decade or more but in the past few years they have really picked up speed. Ansible is a simple, efficient approach to automating and standardizing our environments while cutting down on the time, increasing reliability, and removing the human error factor from operations and deployments!
My Story
Probably around 2012 or so, I was a rookie Linux Systems Administrator just making the move away from managing Windows servers and desktops. I remember how much fun patch days were…at first. We got to take the morning off, spend an evening at our off-site data center, order in some Jimmy John’s, and once the corporate office closed, start patching systems. We ran CentOS, RHEL, Oracle Enterprise, and maybe even an Ubuntu system or two.
Looking back, it was actually an unnecessary time suck! Why!? Patch a couple of hundred servers, by hand, rebooting systems manually, and hoping that nothing broke because the application and database administrators were already at home enjoying the end of their workday. The one saving grace at that point was Tmux (an amazing tool to manage multiple terminal sessions at once). At least then I didn’t have to type yum update 200 times!
I guess Charles Dickens might have said of my career: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” I finally got to focus on Linux Servers, bye-bye Windows, but who wants to spend their Thursday nights patching a couple of hundred servers by hand?
That’s not why you’re here, though. You all know I have my SysAdmin scars and I wear them with pride because now, I get to share amazing lessons I learned (or in today’s case should have learned back then). Today, I want to introduce a tool that could have taken our patching times from 6-7 hours down to what could have been less than an hour. Even more, that process could have been completely automated!
What is Ansible?
Ansible is a project bred from the idea that all infrastructure (even security, networking, and cloud) should be code. In other words, if you think of your lab, network, enterprise, whatever as a restaurant, Ansible would be the recipes the cooks used to make every dish. Ansible is written predominantly in Python and utilizes YAML or “YAML Ain’t Markup Language” (who doesn’t love a good recursive acronym?) for its playbooks.
Ansible, not to be confused with the Red Hat product Ansible Automation Platform, is an open-source project that runs across most Linux and Unix systems as well as Mac and Windows and even networking gear, clouds, and security appliances! The list of modules and supported platforms grows with every release.
The name was inspired by Rocannon’s World, a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. In the 1966 novel, ansible was a fictional, instantaneous communication system. Ansible would later become the name of the open-source tool. Michael DeHann, the original developer decided to build a company around his new tool and with the help of Said Ziouani and Timothy Gerald founded AnsibleWorks Inc. Later, the company was renamed Ansible Inc and eventually was acquired by Red Hat in 2015.
Why Ansible?
Ansible burst onto the field in an age where Infrastructure As Code (IaC) tools seemed to be everywhere. However, Ansible had a few attributes that set it apart from its competition.
For one, Ansible is agent-less. In other words, there is no software to deploy across your enterprise. You could install the Ansible package on your laptop and manage thousands of servers across bare metal, virtual machines, and even the cloud!
Being agentless also opened the door for another advantage: Ansible utilizes OpenSSH to execute remote commands instead of proprietary or platform-specific tools.
Thirdly, Ansible set itself apart by choosing simple, YAML-based text files to define its environments and code. Want to have a pre-defined list of servers to manage? Add it to an inventory file! Want to use Ansible to create a user, set its password, and add an SSH key? Write a playbook. Want to have support for different environments (dev, prod, etc.)? Easy, just create a variable file!
Getting Started
Did I sell you on how easy and awesome Ansible is? Good, because here is the entrée for today’s meal: Let’s install Ansible and use Ansible to add a package on our local system. For the sake of this demonstration, I’ll be using one of my favorite server distros, Fedora Server, specifically Fedora 34. Ansible is available for most major distros, so, consult your package manager to find the correct package.
The first step is to install the required Ansible package and its dependencies:
[ansible@fedora-server-34 ~]$ sudo dnf install -y ansible
Last metadata expiration check: 0:05:30 ago on Tue 22 Jun 2021 04:13:57 PM CDT.
Dependencies resolved.
===============================================================================================================================================================================================================
Package Architecture Version Repository Size
===============================================================================================================================================================================================================
Installing:
ansible noarch 2.9.21-1.fc34 updates 15 M
Installing dependencies:
libsodium x86_64 1.0.18-7.fc34 fedora 165 k
python3-babel noarch 2.9.1-1.fc34 updates 5.8 M
python3-bcrypt x86_64 3.1.7-7.fc34 fedora 44 k
python3-cffi x86_64 1.14.5-1.fc34 fedora 244 k
python3-chardet noarch 4.0.0-1.fc34 fedora 214 k
python3-cryptography x86_64 3.4.6-1.fc34 fedora 1.4 M
python3-idna noarch 2.10-3.fc34 fedora 99 k
python3-jinja2 noarch 2.11.3-1.fc34 fedora 493 k
python3-jmespath noarch 0.10.0-1.fc34 updates 46 k
python3-markupsafe x86_64 1.1.1-10.fc34 fedora 32 k
python3-ntlm-auth noarch 1.5.0-2.fc34 fedora 53 k
python3-ply noarch 3.11-11.fc34 fedora 103 k
python3-pycparser noarch 2.20-3.fc34 fedora 126 k
python3-pynacl x86_64 1.4.0-2.fc34 fedora 110 k
python3-pysocks noarch 1.7.1-8.fc34 fedora 35 k
python3-pytz noarch 2021.1-2.fc34 fedora 49 k
python3-pyyaml x86_64 5.4.1-2.fc34 fedora 194 k
python3-requests noarch 2.25.1-1.fc34 fedora 114 k
python3-requests_ntlm noarch 1.1.0-14.fc34 fedora 18 k
python3-urllib3 noarch 1.25.10-4.fc34 fedora 175 k
python3-xmltodict noarch 0.12.0-11.fc34 fedora 23 k
sshpass x86_64 1.09-1.fc34 fedora 27 k
Installing weak dependencies:
python3-paramiko noarch 2.7.2-4.fc34 fedora 287 k
python3-pyasn1 noarch 0.4.8-4.fc34 fedora 133 k
python3-winrm noarch 0.4.1-2.fc34 fedora 79 k
Transaction Summary
===============================================================================================================================================================================================================
Install 26 Packages
Total download size: 25 M
Installed size: 143 M
Downloading Packages:
<<< Output Truncated >>>
Complete!
[ansible@fedora-server-34 ~]$
Excellent, feel the power yet? Let’s get a little crazy. Let’s write a playbook. Let’s install a package!
I really like htop. It is a “graphical” tool that, in this author’s opinion, makes it much easier to read and understand the output of the top command.
Luckily, it’s available from the default Fedora repos. So, using your favorite text editor, create htop.yml:
What’s all this mean? Let’s break it down line by line. Make sure to start your playbook with three hyphens (-), then name tags are just that, it lets you know what task is being run to make it easier to understand the output (and especially troubleshoot any problems). Next, we have the hosts. For this super-simple example, we are only calling localhost. This could also call any number of hostnames or groups listed in an inventory file. Become is basically your sudo command. If you set Become to yes, Ansible will run with administrative privileges. Otherwise, the playbook will run as whatever user calls the playbook.
Under tasks, we have another name tag. We are calling the package module. This is what is so cool about Ansible; you can actually build playbooks that will run over differing distributions! The package module is intuitive enough to know what your system’s package manager is: apt for Ubuntu, yum for CentOS, dnf for Fedora, and so on. Next, we call the package, in our case, htop. The final line is the state of the package. We can set this to a specific version, to absent (if we don’t want the called package installed), or latest, which (you guessed it!) means the package will be on the latest version.
Now, save your config file, and let’s run our playbook:
[ansible@fedora-server-34 ~]$ rpm -qa|grep htop
[ansible@fedora-server-34 ~]$ ansible-playbook htop.yml
[WARNING]: provided hosts list is empty, only localhost is available. Note that the implicit localhost does not match 'all'
PLAY [installing packages] ************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
TASK [Gathering Facts] ****************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost]
TASK [install htop] *******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
changed: [localhost]
PLAY RECAP ****************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
localhost : ok=2 changed=1 unreachable=0 failed=0 skipped=0 rescued=0 ignored=0
[ansible@fedora-server-34 ~]$ rpm -qa|grep htop
htop-3.0.5-4.fc34.x86_64
[ansible@fedora-server-34 ~]$
You can see htop is not installed before we run our playbook, then after we run it, htop is indeed present!
Wrap Up
So, there you have it. You now have the power to go out and install a package on any SSH-enabled host system. Go forth and blow people’s minds! When you take this simple example and zoom out, you start to see the sheer power that Ansible can bring to a Systems Administrator. Step aside, Luke Skywalker, we don’t need the Force anymore to move your X-Wing. We’ll do it with Ansible!
Okay…That may be over the top. However, I can’t overstate the truth: Build out your playbooks. Grow your Ansible skills. The rule is, if you have to do a task more than once: AUTOMATE IT! Stop installing packages by hand. Quit wasting your time bootstrapping servers by copy-pasting commands out of a shared document. Take those commands, add in some Jinja-variable goodness, and let computers do what they were meant to do: make the lives of humans easier.
Like a terrible TV infomercial, just wait, there’s more! Have a favorite open source project you like or a system service that you tend to modify? You may not even have to start from scratch! Ansible has galaxies (pun intended) of pre-built roles and playbooks available. Ansible Galaxy is a community-driven effort to provide pre-built code to get your systems up and running fast. They have playbooks for Nextcloud Server, LAMP, and even desktop applications!
I use Ansible every time I build out a new VM. I use Ansible to ensure my user account is configured exactly the same way across all my systems: laptop, desktop, server, VMs, and cloud! Admittedly, my list of Ansible To-Dos is still fairly large, however, I try to spend a little time each month adding to it. Slowly but surely, I am automating and standardizing my home lab and home production systems. You can too!
Let me know below how you are or are planning to use Ansible.
Did you like this post? Let me know in the comments if there is more you’d like to read on this topic. There is SO much more we could talk about from products like Red Hat’s Ansible Tower (or the upstream AWX project) to large-scale use cases, bootstrapping, and more. So, by all means, let me know what you are interested in.
Thank you so much for spending your valuable time to hear my “war stories” and letting me share a tool with you I am quite passionate about.
(This post originally appeared here and is used with permission.)
Before coming to Red Hat, I spent nearly a decade as a Systems Administrator. After all that time, I’m still continually discovering tools that would make life as a SysAdmin much easier. One of these utilities is the redhat-support-tool. In this post, we’ll walk you through using the tool in some real-world scenarios.
What is the Red Hat support tool?
The support tool allows you to interact with the Red Hat knowledge base, support tickets, analyze log files, and even set site-wide configuration options, all from the command line! At first glance, that may not seem like a big deal but consider these real-world scenarios.
Want to catch the rest of this post? Head over to the Red Hat blog!
These days it can be overwhelming to select the best software to use because now more than ever, choices are abundant when it comes to software. Messaging and Communications apps are a great example of that because there are so many options out there. What if you’re looking for a messaging app that is scaleable and privacy-focused? It can be even harder.
Thanks to the Element team, I’ve got a great option to show you. Element, previously known as Riot.im, is a cross-platform client that works on the Matrix protocol. What does that mean? Is Neo the One? Well, let’s talk about the protocol and why you should consider using this great messaging platform.
What Is Matrix?
The Matrix team describes it as an “open standard for secure, de-centralized, real-time communication”. First, it’s open-source, more eyes equals better code. We all know how much I love open source…but for the uninitiated, that means more people can read and study the code, security vulnerabilities can be found and fixed faster, and other projects and contributors can build effective integrations into the source project.
Second, it’s decentralized. This is a little more complicated, but think of it this way, when you stand up an instance of a decentralized application, that is your space. This could be for a family, a meetup, or a company. Everything would be self-contained until you make your instance discoverable. At that point, you@yourhomeserver.com can reach out into the world and find say friend@anotherserver.com.
Thirdly, Matrix supports real-time communications. This includes collaboration, messaging, voice, and even video! Matrix provides a series of encryption algorithms and bridges to facilitate end-user applications to communicate with one another. You may use Etherpad for real-time collaborative document editing, Jitsi for video conferencing, and in today’s blog post, Element for messaging.
Some of the most popular bridges for Matrix are IRC and Gitter. The Open Source Community jumps in with some of their own too, including Telegram and Google Hangouts.
Matrix enables the communications between these platforms within an instance or throughout the interconnected network of Matrix instances across the Internet.
What is Element?
If Matrix is the network, then the Element client is the vehicle that allows you to traverse that network; Element is the interface for text, voice, and video conversations. Just like the Matrix protocol, the Element client is completely open-source!
With the ability to bridge between different apps like Slack right into the Element interface, you no longer need to install and maintain a dozen different apps just to keep in touch with friends, family, work, your volunteer group, your work’s other chat client…you get the idea.
Create an account, activate the needed integrations, and chat with anyone, anywhere on any number of different platforms. Enjoy a 1:1 conversation or hundreds of participants in public rooms.
Bonus: One of my favorite features? Notifications management. I can have every notification from every room, set it to only being notified if I am tagged, or never get any notifications…ever. But Element didn’t stop there, nope, they have one of my favorite notification settings I have ever seen: keyword notifications.
Let’s say I want to know any time someone is talking about dogs. I can add keywords to my configuration and get notified anytime someone says dog, dogs, cats drool, you get the idea!
Element has the option to join the central server at Matrix.org, host your own instance on your own server, or pay a monthly fee for a secure, hosted option. In fact, from their website, you can get up to 5 active users a month for as little as $2/month (USD).
Creating Your Account
It’s now time for you to enter the Matrix and get into your Element. See what I did there? Alright, to get started you will need to create an account. One of the best things about Element is that you can use it on all sorts of devices like your laptop, tablet, phone, or whatever.
For this guide, I’m going to show you how to do it on the Web client in your browser. So open up your favorite browser, such as Mozilla Firefox, and navigate to https://app.element.io.
Your browser will likely ask you to allow access to persistent storage. Accept it that way Element can store your keys, messages, etc. Next, we are going to create an account.
We could create our account on Matrix.Org, but here is a little pro tip: The central server in a federation usually is over-taxed and prone to lag. So, if you know of another public-facing instance, that would be a good bet.
Lucky for us, the community has some awesome members that manage LinuxDelta.com, a community-driven hub for information on Linux distributions, tutorials, and a Matrix server! Instead of using the Matrix.Org option, we are going to go to Advanced/Other:
In the ‘Homeserver URL’ field, type in: https://matrix.linuxdelta.com and click on the green next button. Next, it’s time to create a username. The username will be your display name as well so keep this in mind as you decide. This is what people will see you responding as and how they can tag or search for you! Then create a password, make sure it’s complex. No sense in skimping on security especially if you are utilizing a password manager, like Bitwarden for instance.
Me personally, I am a content creator and a community advocate. I want to be found in the open-source community, so, I would add an email so people can look me up via email. If you do, you’ll of course be sent the customary email confirmation link. For now, though, let’s go ahead and sign in.
Once you have filled in your username, password, and email go ahead and click the green Register button!
This next step is tricky but stay with me. One of the advantages of Element we discussed was end-to-end encryption. We need to generate a Security Key (that is different from our password!). I typically recommend using a system-generated key. Then you can use a secure note somewhere to store the key.
Disclaimer – I changed the security key after writing this blog post, so, don’t think you can get into my account that easily. 😀
Once you’ve saved your key somewhere safe, go ahead and enable notifications and read through some of Element’s recent announcements.
Getting Connected
You are sitting with a brand new, secured account. Now what? Well, Element is a communication platform, let’s find some people to communicate with!
In the middle of the window, there is the option to “Explore Public Rooms”. Let’s click there. Element will default to your home instance, in this case, LinuxDelta.com.
Get connected to The Geek Lab, for instance, by clicking join. That will put you in touch with hundreds of other technology enthusiasts like yourself who hang out, chat, and help each other fix technical problems.
Want to get connected to the broader world? Go back to the Explore button, next to the search bar. In the window we saw before, we have the option to create a new room or select a different server. Let’s hop over to Matrix.org.
There are literally thousands of public rooms covering a crazy number of different topics. Many open-source projects have communities on Matrix. There are HAM radio enthusiasts, D&D (Dungeon and Dragon) hangouts, and even region-focused rooms.
The join process is exactly the same though for a different server, just find a room you want, click join, and start chatting.
There is plenty more to do and discover. From 1 on 1 conversation, adding bridges, and initiating video calls. However, for now, that is all the deeper we will go!
Closing Thoughts
You may be surprised to hear that this is not paid content. I wrote this because I believe in Element. I believe that Matrix is going to have a HUGE part to play in the years to come. There are SO many (read too many) apps to keep track of. Many of them have ads or tracking built-in, or are limited to voice or text. Element, powered by Matrix, has it all. The integrations keep getting better. More and more bridges keep getting built (no pun intended, okay, maybe a little pun).
Open Source is the key. E2E (End to End Encryption) will ensure that your private conversations stay private… You know, I haven’t even mentioned the beautiful interface or that the Element Team releases new features on a frequent basis.
So go sign up and give Element & the Matrix protocol a try! When you get your account registered, be sure to look me up: itguyeric@one.ems.host
(This article was originally posted here and is used and updated with permission.)
For me, it’s meetings, household chores, ongoing projects, random lists, IMs, Emails, forum posts, social media (yeah, believe it!), whew. For years, I tried different tools and methods for tracking my to-dos. I was pretty good at it… Most of the time. It seemed like now and then, though, I would hit a breaking point and all the plates I had been juggling would fall to the floor, and I’d have to start over again.
Enter Todoist, a product which boasts you can “regain clarity and calmness by getting all those tasks out of your head and onto your to-do list (no matter where you are or what device you use).” To say that Todoist is a to-do list or even a project management application would be a gross understatement. Over the past few years, I have managed to shift from an anxious task tracker to a productivity power user.
I work a demanding job in a challenging field, host a podcast, a live stream, have a wife, four wonderful kids, and a few hobbies. Add on top of that the need to sleep, work out, and get things done around our house. I don’t say that to impress you. We are all busy. It’s a challenge. What I plan to unleash into your minds is a series of tools and methods I use every day to get everything done. We’ll cover Todoist, email management, ways to focus on tasks (like me trying to write this blog post), and much, much more.
Grab your caffeine and hold on tight. Here we go!
Why use a to-do list?
“I don’t need a to-do list. I have that list in my head.”
Pleeeaaase. No you don’t! We live in a world of CRAZY connectivity! Everything is always on all the time. Tweets, news, sports, YouTube, podcasts…and that’s just a short list only from the digital world! Many of us have multiple devices within a few feet of our favorite chair that spend their time lighting up, dinging, buzzing, and ringing. Attention spans and deep work are at an all-time low.
“So what, I can multitask.”
Sorry, Charlie! That’s a common misconception. What you are really doing is context switching. The more alike tasks are, the easier it is to switch between the two in a short space of time and with little productivity penalty. However, if you go from following a lively instant messaging thread about plastic versus metal dice for tabletop games to working on a 3-year business plan, you aren’t giving either your full attention.
Not only are you not giving either task your full attention, but you are also draining your limited energies for the day. You’re shifting gears between two very different tasks. That comes with a tax and lowers the quality of the finished product. We try to compensate for this by starting several tasks at once, then getting nothing done. Then, as inevitably happens to me, your youngest daughter bursts into your room and grabs your iPad off your desk! By the time you get her setup with her afternoon activity and get back to work, those 3 or 4 or 5 tasks have all fallen and shattered all over the floor. Now, you have to spend wasted time trying to pick up where you left off with each task!
“Eric, tell me there is a better way!”
Fear not, my young apprentices. There is a better way! To-do lists. Ta-da! That’s it. You’re welcome.
Oh, wait… You want to know which one? Okay, I got you. Sorry, I dropped the mic too soon.
How I found Todoist
I used to be stuck on Microsoft Outlook 2003. It had a decent task tracker… You could schedule tasks, set reminders, and eventually could even set tasks to repeat. It was okay. Eventually, I moved to Apple Tasks. It wasn’t as feature rich as it is today, but it got the job done and as a bonus synced to my mobile device. I’d also tried out Trello, but at the time couldn’t quite get a handle on how to use a task board (stay tuned, wink wink!). I also tried organizing projects into MS Project in college (yeah, I was that nerd), eventually projects moved into Evernote, and later Joplin.
Tasks and projects though are two different beasts entirely, but they are also connected! What I found I needed was a way to do both, preferably in the same tool. I needed to be able to do scheduling, track progress, and and and… My list of needs seemed to keep getting longer, how could any tool stand up to that!?
A friend of mine told me about this tool with a weird sounding name: Todoist. To-Do List without the L, clever, huh?
I had my doubts and, if I am being honest, was just looking for excuses not to use it. Strike 1 it’s not open source, strike 2 it’s a paid, cloud service. I told my friend this wasn’t looking good.
UI Screenshot, Todoist.com
However, I begrudgingly created an account, and what I found surprised me. It had a simple-yet-beautiful user interface (UI), incredibly intuitive layout, and many of the features I felt I needed out of a task management tool. I can remember setting aside my work for the rest of the afternoon; I needed to give this tool a proper test drive. A few hours later, I was sold, literally, I signed up for the Pro subscription right then and there.
I could set reminders, recurring tasks, could set labels or organize by project. I had a Today view, that really helped, so I didn’t see EVERYTHING I needed to do, just wanted I wanted to get through that day. Not only that, but I had multiple levels of tasks (projects, sections, tasks, sub-tasks, and priorities).
It didn’t stop there, though! Since becoming a Todoist customer, they have introduced Kanban boards. Now, instead of sections just being a “subproject”, I could use Agile practices to track my work across their typical life cycle, say from idea to outline, draft, edit, and ready to publish. I could set up email aliases for each of my projects, that way, when someone emailed me a task to complete, I could hit forward, add in some metadata, and hit send. Within a couple of minutes, that task was also captured by my Todoist.
Todoist released Calendar integration. This made it much easier to judge how much work I had to get done. The average work day for me ranges from 30 minutes of meetings, up to 6 hours some days. (Yeah, tell me about it! That’s a lot of meetings.) The problem was, those meeting heavy days I may try to schedule my usual 8-10 tasks and get only a couple of them done. Well, I don’t want meetings to break my streak!! No way! So, I started creating tasks for meetings. Attend a meeting, mark off a task. It kept the streak alive, but also helped me plan better – more meetings, fewer tasks scheduled that day.
Getting Tasks Organized
Like many, many human beings, I sat there that first afternoon, staring at this blank canvas. Now what? I can create anything, schedule it any time, what do I do!?
Eric’s Project List
After a brief battle with the void, I started out by creating projects for each major area of my life and color-coding them similar to my different calendar accounts I was already using: Personal (Blue), Work (Red), and General Tech (Green). For the most part, several years later, I still use roughly that same layout, though I have added a couple more top-level projects. For instance, I eventually added my content creation efforts like the Sudo Show and this blog to their own project.
The next easiest thing to do was to go into Apple Tasks and grab all the tasks I had stashed away in there. Take out the trash, submit a time sheet, etc. Short, recurring tasks were the first to come over. Put them in the right project, give them a due date, and move on to the next task.
The harder migration (at first) was how do I break up the projects on my plate and put them into Todoist? Fortunately, Todoist had me covered. Each project has sections. So, underneath my work project, I have a section for general tasks, for each of the engineering teams I support, meetings, and one for the live stream I host every other week.
I could then add my old projects as tasks inside each of these sections. From there, I learned how to break up a large task (like a podcast episode) into sub-tasks from researching the topic, writing the outline, following up with the guest, and eventually releasing the episode. This made it easy to break off bite-sized chunks of a task and get a little progress done each day! (Incredibly beneficial when you release a new episode every two weeks!)
While I was able to migrate a LOT of my ideas, tasks, and projects in the first couple of days, my approach to project planning, task execution, and idea tracking have evolved over the years. I’ll share more on that in a later post. Nowadays, I get between 10-15 tasks done a day. I have my paper notebook open every meeting to jot down thoughts or ideas, but I also have Todoist open somewhere (phone, tablet, web, or app) to make sure I grab any action items that I need to address. I constantly filter through my emails, ensuring nothing gets asked of me there. Anytime I get an IM with a request, into Todoist it goes!
Why Choose Todoist Brake Down (Graphic provided by Crazy Egg)
Want to get started?
I would highly encourage you to get started with Todoist. It’s an amazing tool fueled by a company of folks who are passionate about helping you get more done. They have frequent releases that improve performance, squash bugs, and are still adding new features! They’re used by Apple, NASA, and folks from all different walks of life.
Disclaimer: This link is an affiliate link. If you purchase a Todoist subscription, I get a small percentage. That being said, I would be greatly appreciative of you using my link as anything I make from it is set aside to be reinvested into my content creation efforts (gear, hosting, etc.).
My Reading List
Before you go, I wanted to drop one more idea into your lap: From the screenshots, you’ll notice an orange project called Reading List. Todoist is a great place to drop books, blogs, and white papers!
I have a recurring task to check my RSS feed for any articles that have been published from my list of sources. I probably get about 40+ articles delivered to my RSS reader every day and read probably 25% of them from top to bottom. That can stack up if I don’t keep up with it.
I also do a TON of research between work, the podcast, and my own curiosity. White papers, data sheets, etc. are a hugely popular way to share content these days. Fortunately, Todoist has me covered there too. Todoist supports attachments! If I have a market research report to review, I’ll download it out of my email and drop it in a task and assign a date, that way I am certain I get to it.
Finally, there is my backlog of 60-some-odd books that has been accumulating over the years, from fiction to marketing to parenting. Todoist has even helped me knock that list down from 90 to 60 in the past year or so. When someone recommends me a book, I grab the link from the Kindle website and create a task for it. When I start a new book, I create a sub-task for every chapter. Then, I schedule one chapter a day each workday until that book is complete. The last chapter marks the book task complete, and I move on to the next book!
To keep things interesting, I usually pull a book from each category in my list, then start back at the top. I hope one day to only have a handful of books in this project, but considering my appetite for learning, I doubt it!
Wrap Up
Over the past couple of years, my productivity has skyrocketed! I feel confident I can manage a wide array of tasks on a wide range of projects and still keep my sanity.
Todoist now has a hand in: meeting tracking, household chores, my reading list, podcast and content planning, social media scheduling, and learning. I track tasks from keeping my daily food log to changing the water filter every 2 months, to reminding me to renew that one subscription each year that requires manually requesting a renewal. I haven’t even begun working with a lot of the integrations available in Todoist!
One thing I hope to implement soon is ensuring that recreation and disconnect time become scheduled, recurring tasks in my Todoist so that I can keep the momentum going. Whether that is a day to turn off all my notifications and rest or take the kids to the park. It’s easy to get caught up in all the demands of this world and forget what is truly important: love, joy, fun, family.
Take this journey with me. If you are struggling, learn from my mistakes and my victories. I highly recommend Todoist, but it’s not the only tool out there. Find one that works for you, and let it help you make a difference in your life and in the lives of those around you!
