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This week —
Are to-do apps doing more harm than good? Clive Thompson’s WIRED article is a well-researched, fascinating insight into the way our brains cope with planning the stuff we have to get done.
🌿Annette Raffan wants to develop a healthy task management habit. She’s strongly against tasks in Obsidian (that’s her happy place), and she doesn’t want Gantt charts, Todoist, TickTick, Notion, or Outlook.
If you’re a Medium member, you can check out Annette’s quirky, Shakespearean-themed article here.
What principles or ideas would you give someone who feels like they’ve wasted far too much time trying to implement approaches they can’t seem to stick to, and who is looking for a simple system with value that transcends apps?
My current all-tasks-on-one-page system (TaskPaper) is working wonderfully to keep me focused on the work rather than organising how to do the work, but I’m aware it’s not for everyone — and it may not even be for me, next year!
My advice to Annette, and to anyone who finds themselves tossed to and fro on turbulent seas of task management, is to start with a piece of paper or a plain text document, and go from there.
When you begin from a point of ultimate simplicity, sometimes you discover that your true task management requirements aren’t what you thought they were. Sometimes you have to get to the bottom of the issue or issues that, system or no system, are keeping you from attacking your tasks with gusto in the first place.
For each item on your list, ask —
If your answers to those questions were fairly neutral, congratulations! It’s a lot easier to find a truly helpful task management system when you aren’t weighed down with mental or emotional baggage. If, however, the questions brought up some Big Feelings, well, then; you have some work to do, either on your own or with the help of a qualified professional.
I’m in the Big Feelings camp, and am still working through my issues; thankfully, with a lot more success these days. Simplifying everything has been an important part of that journey.
This past week I’ve been focusing on budgeting. As much as I want to do all of it in plain text, for the time being I’m seeing what I can learn from the free 34-day YNAB trial. Four days in, and loving the view.
The problem with tracking my finances in plain text isn’t the capability of the solutions (Ledger, hledger, Beancount) that make it work; it’s with the people who aren’t me, that also need access to the figures, and who can’t or won’t get over the learning curve.
I haven’t given up; just following a different branch of the tree for a time.
Something I loved about buying a new paper planner each year was seeing all those pre-printed hours, just waiting for me to slip my plans between their cool, inviting divider lines. I’ve created more than my share of complex plain text daily note layouts attempting to recapture that simple, calendar-free scheduling approach, before giving them all away in an effort to rid myself of shiny object/system syndrome. To cut away the cruft and focus on the most pleasing essentials.
Earlier this week I created a time-saving template sporting nothing but a list of hours, ready to be inserted into the daily notes that want one:
https://youtube.com/shorts/_V7ZPbSbQsQ?si=m34hMCALgNMb-ZBW
It’s the opposite of pretentious, and that’s why I love it. I don’t always want to plan my day by the hour, or with a calendar, but when I do… this barebones approach gives me a picture of my rough intentions for the hours ahead. To reschedule, I use the custom keyboard shortcut ⌘1 to move lines up, and ⌘2 to move them down.
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