I’ve gone fully analog for personal to-dos. I use Basecamp for work stuff, but for private task management, I’m just using Ugmonk’s Analog cards. Tracking tasks on paper has been easier than I thought it would be. Copying things over to the next Today card when you don’t do something and seeing tasks sit on a Next or Someday card for a few weeks really drives home the realization that you weren’t really excited about the things you thought you were excited about.
This dovetails nicely into my recent obsession with Shape Up. Under Shape Up, you never plan more than 6 weeks out because the things you thought you’d want to do 3 months from now aren’t always that important when the time you scheduled to do them comes. Instead of planning way out in the future, just reassess your next short-term plan later on.
Paper task management works similarly. It’s a pain to track a bunch of tasks for the future. (Appointments are different—they aren’t tasks per se.) So you schedule less for your future self. You’ll surely fill your time in the end, but you’ll fill your time with what’s important to you in the moment, which is all any of us actually have.
This dovetails nicely into my recent obsession with Shape Up. Under Shape Up, you never plan more than 6 weeks out because the things you thought you’d want to do 3 months from now aren’t always that important when the time you scheduled to do them comes. Instead of planning way out in the future, just reassess your next short-term plan later on.
Paper task management works similarly. It’s a pain to track a bunch of tasks for the future. (Appointments are different—they aren’t tasks per se.) So you schedule less for your future self. You’ll surely fill your time in the end, but you’ll fill your time with what’s important to you in the moment, which is all any of us actually have.