The "no schedule" and the "index cards" seems to be a little contradicting. If you're setting yourself up to do 3-5 things the next day, you are setting a sche

The "no schedule" and the "index cards" seems to be a little contradicting. If you're setting yourself up to do 3-5 things the next day, you are setting a schedule for yourself; it's just not time specific, that's all. In effect, you're limiting yourself to only those tasks. Eg., if one of the task involves research on coding solution, and the solution you found uses a nice coding technique you are not familiar with, you wouldn't have the freedom to learn it right there. If you have to put it off, most likely it will be forgotten or will lose interest in it. The counter argument of say putting only 5 hrs or so of task on the index card so you can still have freedom to do the example I mentioned doesn't hold since one of the task may be to fix a minor bug that turned out to be more involved than you thought. For me, instead of putting the time to create such a "next day" task list, I just have a list of task I know I need to do for work and for myself. For work, trac is used (or whatever the company uses). For myself, I keep a list of project goals, but no task lists. The time I saved for making and planning task is spent on jogging down how much time I spent doing what at the end of day instead. This keeps myself honest in not wasting time yet have the freedom to do things I like at the moment.