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).