Things 4 Good
Updates on our family’s candle‑making fundraiser for charity. I share insights on costs and materials, celebrate the growing impact and donations raised over four years, and invite readers to help us choose new scents.
- Tasks: Contrary to the sentence directly above, this is a project and not a folder. It is the only project I have at the top level. This is my generic bucket of action items that are specifically not a project and should move through my system quickly. Examples could include “Get groceries”, “Call about electric bill”, or “Schedule coffee with Jim”.
- Self: Projects that are specifically about me. Two notable projects in here are “Personal Routines” and “Technology Routines”. I use projects like this for repeating tasks like “Schedule a haircut” or “Do blog gardening”. In OmniFocus these are single-action projects that never complete.
- Family: Projects regarding our family. These can be things like “Labor Day Weekend at the Cabin”, “Celebrate Tammy’s Birthday”, or “Send Christmas Cards”.
- SPS: Here is everything about me being CTO at SPS Commerce. There are a lot of projects here and subfolders for different aspects of that dimension.
- Professional: This is for projects about me being a CTO but not about SPS. For example, I’m a board member at Air T. If I’m speaking at a community event that would go in here. It is “everything else” about me as a CTO.
- Home: Projects about our home. The anchor project here is “Maintain Home” which contains recurring tasks about, you guessed it, maintaining the home. And then there are various projects for things we do. A project that will show up in here soon via a template is “Prepare home for winter”.
- Cabin: Same as above, but for our cabin. Notably, if we are entertaining a group at our cabin on a weekend I create that as a project in Family, not in Cabin. This is about the Cabin.
- Travel: This is the newest folder I have and it has projects for trips that we take. I have templates that I’m regularly improving to populate these since I tend to forget things, or worry I did. I may have a project in here a year before we go and is a fun way to group things for those upcoming travel events. I’m still completing a couple of tasks for “Vacation to Ireland” that we did in June.
- Financial: Projects related to managing finances. Every year this is going to get a “Prepare taxes” project, again built off of a template. I have a “Teach kids about the markets” project in there now.
- Social: Projects that are about giving back. I’m on the MnTech board and I put that activity here. We also hold our annual Things 4 Good candle sale supporting non-profits and that project goes in here.
- Hobbies: Projects for my hobbies. This one does have three notable subfolders: Reading, Weekly Thing, Websites. I currently am wrapping up a project here for “Help Josh with website” that I used to get Rambling Josh setup for my cousin.
- Ticklers: Used for lists to remind me about things, or nudge me. One example I have in here is a project for “Use Gift Certificates, Credits” that gets an entry for any of those I’ve received so I don’t forget. I’ve got a task in there now with a due date to use a credit I got from a store. I also have a very special “Repeating Projects” project here that has single actions on a repeating schedule to create projects. Examples include “Create project for Pi Day”, “Create project to winterize house”, and “Create project to adjust clocks for DST”. These usually have links in the notes to go to Drafts and open that template, or to a Shortcut that creates the project itself.
- Someday, Maybe: Someday lists are powerful, especially for folks that have more ideas than time which is probably more common than not. I wasn’t sure how to structure these though so that the reviews made sense. I finally came upon the idea of having a separate Someday, Maybe list for each folder above. So this folder contains 10 single-action projects, all paused, for each of those.
- Lists: This folder contains my general reference lists. Nothing in this folder is actionable and never has tags. Things don’t get completed in these projects, they instead would get moved or copied somewhere else. This includes projects like “Books to consider”, “Shows to watch”, “Restaurants to go to”, and “Questions for Doctor”.
- Winter Wonderland is always the most popular scent and we started with more than twice as many of those as any other scent.
- Old Fashioned was a very popular new scent this year and was the first to sell out.
- Plain Jane, also a new scent, had a lot of early sales and then slowed down a lot. This scent was most popular when someone bought a lot of candles as gifts.
For the very first time ever outside of our private events, Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser at the Mount Olivet Holiday Boutique! A bit confusing how to setup our table and get folks our message but we are figuring it out. 🤩
The Things 4 Good 2024 Candle Fundraiser POAP is ready to share with folks at this weekends event! It is a good example of how I’m not a designer. 😬
We poured the last batch of candles for this weekends Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser! Pre-labeled, so trim wicks and ready to go. I’m very happy with how they all turned out.
Tammy and I made another four dozen Things 4 Good candles for next weekend’s fundraiser!
Tammy and I made our first batch of candles for the Things 4 Good 2024 Candle Fundraiser! Tonight we poured Just Crackle and Winter Wonderland and drained 8 gallons of wax. 🕯️
My GTD Structure
I suppose I’m a “list person”. Although I would say I’m a GTD practitioner. I like the sound of that better. And my lists, or GTD system, is managed with OmniFocus. Since my Omni Show appearance I’ve had several email exchanges with fellow “list people” about how I structure my lists. I thought I would share a more complete view.
Before getting to the lists themselves a comment. The structure that I have in my system, “the stuff” as it were, the things to do and how I organize them, is fluid. I don’t change tools often but the content and structure I refactor when it suits me. With that said though, these top level folders for my lists have endured in largely this structure for a decade.
They have endured because they are specifically aligned around dimensions of my life. If the dimensions of my life change then these would change. But really this big picture stuff doesn’t change frequently. Also note that these folders may at times have only a couple projects, which may be a signal to me that I should be doing more there.
In OmniFocus these dimensions or groups are stored as folders, and these folders contain projects. You could use this structure in most any list manager.
Those are my “working” folders and projects. I do have three more folders that are a little different.
That is all of it! This structure has served me well for a while now and maybe you’ll get some value out of it as well.
Things 4 Good 2023 Fall Fundraiser Insights
We had a great time hosting our 3rd annual Things 4 Good Fall Fundraiser. We raised nearly $6,000 in donations for our four non-profits. A fun thing for me about the fundraiser is it lets us play the role of a retailer for a weekend.
This year we had 55 candle purchases which compares to 52 in 2022 and 51 in 2021. On average people purchased 4 candles. However averages don’t always tell the story. Most people get two candles, and then there are a smaller number of people that get a large number — usually as gifts for the holidays.
We had some new scents this year, and had more scents than we have had the previous two years. The first year we had only four scents, and last year six. This year we had eight different scents. As the number of scents go up we need to be more planful with inventory. For the first time this year we tracked which scents people picked so that we could get better insight for future years. Here is a look at rolling inventory.
Some observations:
I fed the transaction data into ChatGPT and used its data analysis mode to make a run at doing inventory planning for next year. It did a reasonable job but with such a simple dataset I could have gotten most of the way there on my own. It recommended a 30% increase for True North and 20% increase for Old Fashioned. Even though it was a simple use case, it highlighted how powerful it could be at that use case.
We offer folks a number of ways to donate and again Venmo was by far the most popular method, twice as popular as cash. I’ve offered the ability to pay with crypto for all three years, and this year we had our first donation made with Bitcoin via the Lightning Network!
Interesting data for us which will help us with next years event. We are already keeping notes for things we want to do to make next year’s Things 4 Good Fall Fundraiser even better. Send us an email if you have any suggestions!
Also see 2023 Fall Fundraiser Results.
