Like, some of us enjoy kanban frameworks for productivity, and others can’t stand it. He said “it fits the shape of my brain better than anything else I’ve tried.” Even if we might not be able to articulate it, we know what it feels like.Įv Williams, co-founder of Twitter and Medium, endorsed a popular list-making app called Workflowy with one of the most insightful quotes I’ve heard about our relationship to apps. The shape of your brainĪnd there’s just some things that we, as the quite-sophisticated app and technology users we’ve all grown into, understand on a deeper level. This is something you’ll be interfacing with countless times a day – you better hope to enjoy the experience as much as you can. But it just never ever felt right to me.Īnd sometimes, that’s all the reason you need. I tried Todoist a million times – after Thomas Frank and Ali Abdaal and name-your-favorite-YouTuber all suggested it. Todoist, with its fancy features like natural language processing and instant calendar integration. Todoist, the to-do list golden child that productivity advisers across the internet all swear by. One thing I knew for sure, going in, that I told myself: “not Todoist. In following with the expression, my instinct should be “get everything out on paper.” I still do that from time to time, but often times my pen wouldn’t move fast enough to keep up with my mind. When I get overwhelmed with ideas and tasks and pie in the sky dreams swimming around in my head, I’m desperate to get them out of my head and somewhere I can work and shape with them. A secondary capacity to organize things lightly, at least into broad categories – ideally, sub categories.A capacity to dump countless tasks in within seconds – I like to “brain blast” and get it all out at once.A dead simple and quick input system – Ideally a simple “swipe down and start typing” type of situation.You just have to do a little digging – with your personal specifications in mind. And some, inexplicably, are $29.99? For an app I use sometimes when I need to remember to buy milk? Crazy.īut among them are some real contenders for strong and helpful applications. Some look so dinky and cheap they must have not been updated since the iPhone 4. So many that have tried to fit the words “to” and “do” into their titles. So many apps with variations of a check mark as their icon. Do a search on the app store for “to-do list” and you’ll likely be instantly overwhelmed. The searchįinding a good to-do list app, though, is a deceptively tough task. So I set out to fix myself, starting with finding the right to-do list for me. And without it, it’s very easy to feel like you’re drowning in your own head. The to-do list is such a basic function in the organization of anyone’s life – it’s the starting point that everything funnels out of. They might as well be lost forever regardless.īut I’m fed up. But now, as a result, I’m living a very specific nightmare wherein I have a bunch of ideas and responsibilities and things to do swimming around in my head, and they either get stuck there, or they get jotted down on a random scrap of paper, or a hand that I accidentally wash. I just have never felt like any one system worked perfectly for my mind. I’m currently working with a combination of loose post-it notes, scribblings on my hand, and three (three!) different phone apps. But the truth is, I’m a mess.įor example: I’ve been trying to survive without a proper to-do list for months. I would be flattered if you pictured me as a productivity guru, typing fast and time-blocking my calendar and only responding to email at 11am and 4pm, because that’s what I tell you to do. I feel like I’ve been living a lie.Īs someone who literally writes a bi-monthly column about getting things done, you’d think I would have all of my own productivity systems perfectly designed and executed. There’s something I need to come clean about.
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