Why I find having 19 To Do Lists better than having just one
Over the last 13 or so years I’ve tried multiple To Do List apps.
I started with Things which was expensive compared to it’s peers at the time, but had tools for projects and tracking their completion.
I then moved to Epic Win which offered to turn my To Do List into a game and give me XP for completing the things I needed to get done.
I’ve tried any.do, Remember the Milk, Wunderlist and eventually OmniFocus which did admittedly actually have some staying power, but that still shared many attributes with the others on why I stopped using them.
The problem with ‘Someday’
Pretty much every To Do List app follows the same pattern of:
- What to focus on Today
- What’s coming up Tomorrow
- Stuff to do ‘Someday’
There might be variations on the theme such as allowing items to have a due date or assigning them to projects, but the timescale for which an item can be associated generally falls into those 3 ‘buckets’.
This means that when using the app you fixate on completing the items in Today and Tomorrow, and if you don’t think it’s going to be done in those days it goes back to the ‘Someday’ pile.
