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

Posted by jaslar
Feb 3, 2019 at 04:55 PM

A few decades ago, all my time management systems fell apart with the growing complexity of my job, so I read up on various approaches. Putting everything in the calendar just didn’t work for me, other than on a daily basis. For me, a separate task list, that allowed me to shuffle things around, and nest subtasks, was essential for me to stay on top of things. If it went in the calendar first, I lost track of the larger sweep of projects, or relative priority. And the sad truth was, if I missed a task on a particular day due to interruptions or new urgencies, it was a major pain to go back and recover everything.

But different strokes for different folks. And who knows, this truth about myself may be why I am NOT a millionaire.

Dr Andus wrote:
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).