Sort of a poll: What is your favorite task manager/to do app?

Posted by Dr Andus
Feb 3, 2019 at 01:36 PM

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>“Millionaires Don’t Use To-Do Lists”
>https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2015/07/10/to-do-lists-time-management/#54e613644413

One problem with that article is that it suggests a causation or correlation where there may be none.

Rather than suggesting that these people (that constitute a miniscule proportion of the world’s population that needs to manage their todos) have become super successful because they used a calendar instead of a todo list, an alternative explanation may be that these people had an extraordinary skill or resource (which they may have inherited or developed themselves through hard work) that made them so successful that in their daily lives they can delegate most of their menial todos to other people, which probably includes even the broad management of their calendars.

Having said that, modern calendar software have become very sophisticated and are interesting tools.

If you think about Google Calendar and its competitors, you are effectively dealing with a dynamic grid (that moves according to the passage of time), which you can populate with differently coloured cards of varying sizes, which can be freely repositioned and readjusted. It is a very powerful and pliable tool, with realistic constraints.

It is true that every time my given todo system collapses due to some unforeseen event, which then becomes the top priority as the one thing that needs to get done by a critical deadline, I always fall back onto the calendar, as the main space where everything is managed (as there is no more time for faffing about with a todo list at one point, given that all the other todos had become less important for the time being).

Nevertheless, when the crisis is over, I always need to get back to my WorkFlowy and Google Keep lists, Gantt charts, and ConnectedText projects, to regain an overview of my original priorities (as crises are usually imposed on me externally, not of my choosing).

Maybe this article is thinking of todo lists too dogmatically. For me a todo list is not a list of todos that must get done, but a space for thinking about them, organising them, working them out as problems, archiving them, and the vast majority of them will never get done, and that’s fine, in fact the whole purpose of the system (prioritisation).