Is Toodledo dead?

Posted by Dr Andus
Apr 2, 2021 at 04:56 PM

I’ve tried many todo apps over the years, and I ended up having the same problem with all of them, namely, that after a while it was hard to see the forest for the trees.

But even that metaphor breaks down here, as I could see the forest of todos, so that wasn’t the problem.

Maybe the problem was that it was getting increasingly harder to see which ones were the important trees, as they were getting lost in the ever-expanding forest, and far too much time was spent on forest management to find the important trees.

Then I came across a study somewhere which said that the busiest and most productive managers (CEOs and presidents etc.) only use a calendar to manage their todos because only what can get done at a specific point in time is worth focusing on (i.e. is important enough).

So the essential skill here is not task management (and forest management), but task selection, i.e. prioritisation, and choosing tasks and scheduling them in a calendar and getting them done is what matters.

Now it’s possible that this is only valid for those in senior management, and if one is an underling, then we are tasked to manage the forest, so that we can suggest important trees to senior management.

But I feel there is a learning point there that the higher level skill is to learn how to select (prioritise) important and urgent tasks and then focusing on getting them done (by scheduling them in a calendar), and forest management leads to stagnation or at least it’s a lower level skill, almost an admin skills vs. the management or leadership skills of prioritisation.

For the last several years I was using a combination of WorkFlowy (for capturing tasks, managing the forest) and Google Calendar to manage my affairs. But my WorkFlowy has grown into a giant forest of captured tasks most of which are ultimately probably pointless and useless as they never got scheduled because they turned out not to be important or urgent.

Enter RoamResearch, which has emerged as the magic solution to the forest management problem, and for me therefore is the absolute best todo management software I have ever used.

The key feature is the automatically appearing daily page, which forces you to review the previous day’s undone tasks, to evaluate whether they should be transferred over; so it’s a forced moment of reflection, evaluation, and prioritisation every day. (I imagine this is very similar to the bullet journal method.)

Although I still end up with some tasks that I’ve been rolling over for weeks or months, it also forces me to recognise that some of these are no longer important or will never be done and can be forgotten about.

But it also helps me never miss anything important, because it forces me to encounter again tasks that I scheduled for the future, when the given daily note appears on its assigned date. I still use Google Cal to schedule tasks in a calendar format, which just adds another moment of reflection and prioritisation, when tasks get mapped against the available time on a given day or week.

So when it comes to a todo system or software, the key features to evaluate would be how it deals with the growing forest problem, how it helps prioritisation, how it helps scheduling, getting things done, and reminding of future tasks.

Creating an audit trail is also important (and for this Roam is also excellent, as there is a record of each day that’s passed, and the internal linking can ensure the monitoring of connections between past, present, and future tasks and events).