How much do you trust an objection to self-organization posted on the personal domain name "frantic"? As of the time of this comment, no top level or child com

How much do you trust an objection to self-organization posted on the personal domain name "frantic"? As of the time of this comment, no top level or child comments have noted this post enumerates the same surface complaints always arising from the same approach to writing down massive lists of minutiae to accomplish: The failure mode looks like this: - pick up app - put in lists - get overwhelmed (or don't find it helpful) - give up - industriously write a post rationalizing the result While some people succeed at TODO lists just from the basics, when most of us don't, it may be we aren't understanding the first principles in use by folks for whom the lists work. In no particular order: - writing an item down relieves anxiety by freeing it from your mind - subsets and overall views enables system-level 'solves' for your workflow - having more than one list combines these: DOING, preceded by TODO NEXT, preceded by MAYBE DO, preceded by SOMEDAY/NEVER (and follow DOING with DONE, and ARCHIVE) - use Personal Kanban style view for overall glanceability and to limit work in progress, but don't put the SOMEDAY or ARCHIVE lists there, keep MAYBE and DONE short as well, maybe keep the MAYBE list off the view too, so you're just TODO, DOING, DONE - skim your DOING and TODO at the start of productivity periods (mornings, afternoons, whatever), skim your MAYBE weekly or if you run out of TODO, skim your SOMEDAY/NEVER on rainy days. - solve magnitudes by breaking down subtasks either in your own head when you do the big task, or breaking down the tasks when it's time to undertake the task. (Apps supporting an affordance such as the checklists on the back of Trello cards are a good way of hiding this detail unless you need it.) - solve contexts (if you care about 7 in the blog post) by understanding and using ... contexts: https://support.omnigroup.com/documentation/omnifocus/mac/2.6/en/contexts/ https://support.omnigroup.com/documentation/omnifocus/mac/2.... - contexts are particularly powerful if you context switch often. for instance, as a manager you can @context tag with your directs' initials, giving you a built-in agenda for ad-hoc 1:1s. same for @client contexts. - contexts also go well with timeboxing, an even more powerful outcome enabler tool than lists In short, and using numbering from the post: 1. Use the method to eliminate need for willpower 2. It's not about lists, it's about focus. Keep It Short and Simple. 3. Moving a kanban card to a DONE column provides that dopamine hit 4. See triage / parking lot, maybe, before TODO. Limit WIP, but also limit TODO to the things you see are important. Take pleasure in pushing something back off the TODO list into the MAYBE column, or from MAYBE to SOMEDAY. Focus wins. 5. This sounds like a UI problem, reject methods or apps with this problem. Both paper methods and good tools don't have this issue, offering at least 3 orders of human timescale magnitudes. 6. Use Timeboxing so the calendar provides the nudge to switch into a context until the timebox becomes a habit. (Habits beat nudges.) 7. See above on contexts. At the root of most objections to TODO methods is this single most fundamental misunderstanding and mis-implementation: - the main point of such lists is not to make you do things - it's to help you NOT do things! Use your lists to NOT do things, and the whole value prop flips, which goes to the heart of motivation as well. Think: by jotting these down, there's so many things I don't have to think about, so many things I don't have to do now. I am freed to focus on value. It's no accident OmniFocus features the word Focus in the name. However, that app is relatively overwhelming for anyone but the most die-hard GTD fans. Tools more like Trello (or Toodledo, or Remember the Milk) can do everything necessary, but so can (perhaps surprisingly!) Apple Reminders or Microsoft TODO or OneNote or Obsidian or OrgMode, or really any text outliner with an ability to mark or flick text from one place to another. For ideas on how to use other tools, check out David Allen's many guides to implementing GTD across all kinds of tools. Then, don't stress about GTD, just do personal Kanban with some of the GTD principles and timebox your focus. For what it's worth, I don't think the author is against focus tools, just complaining about tools that are bad for the job!