I can already imagine hearing the gasps of horror from the people reading this article’s title. Hopefully, I’ll make more sense by the time you get to the end of the piece.
A bit more than a month ago, I was working on generating ideas for an update of my product — lots of ideas and tasks were popping into my mind throughout this, and I was writing them all down, one by one, into my Todoist inbox.
Most of the ideas didn’t seem great, but I recorded them anyway, to make sure that they weren’t forgotten.
This had a knock-on effect, however, when it was time for review. The overflowing list caused too much stress for what it was doing, which at the time was capturing half-baked ideas that weren’t going to cause any progress or change.
So I decided to switch things up.
For the past month, I stopped using Todoist and instead recorded anything important in a small Traveler’s Notebook.
This notebook came with me in my pocket so I had similar access to a capture method as with an app or an equivalent.
It was a strongly contrasting method to before. So what did I notice?
First of all, I felt less desire to capture the random points that floated into my head. The friction of getting out the notebook and a pen and finding a suitable surface to write on solved that. The result was that only the highest quality ideas stayed around, which kept in line with the minimalism principles that I love very well.
The next change I noticed was a reduction in stress about how I was going to set out the notebook. Something that I struggle with due to the imposed limits of a text entry field in a todo app, this didn’t bother me when there was a blank canvas before my eyes. I simply wrote the day’s date if I hadn’t already, and expressed what was in my head in the most natural way possible.
If something remained relevant across days, I copied it under the current date. If it didn’t, it got left behind. This meant I didn’t get bogged down with hundreds of tasks that hung around indefinitely — if something was no longer relevant it got left in the back pages as other, more important notes filled the current ones.
This has caused me to feel a lot less pressure to complete everything. When my Todoist task lists were always crowded it felt as though I was playing permanent catch-up with obligations. This way I could leave the ideas that weren’t worth it where they belong — in the past.
It wasn’t just any old month that I tested this strategy in either — throughout I was working on upgrading my product PARAZETTEL. The volume of tasks and work was high, but I didn’t notice any kind of reduction in productivity, and I felt a lot better about the work that I was doing too.
(If you want to check out the resulting work from this method of task management then you can check out the PARAZETTEL V2 website).
So will I go back to using task management apps?
It’s likely. I’ve already started to phase Todoist back in for important recurring tasks. I missed one or two newsletter issues while I was just using the notebook and I don’t want this to become a theme when things are higher-stakes.
The key seems to be balance in how you use your task list — if you saturate it with loads of unnecessary things you never complete then it’s going to lose its value.
If tasks are causing you some stress, take some time away from your current system so that you reset your baseline for how it should be used.
I hope that you’ve enjoyed reading this piece and take something away from it to help you manage your tasks.
If you want to check out how I manage my notes, which fits in nicely with tasks, you can sign up for my email list, where I talk about my Obsidian vault system PARAZETTEL…