[spec-obs]

I've taken to relying on just my memory and then use a calendar to sketch out into blocks what I will work on for the day (just mark them as free so if someone has something important they can see those slots as available). I do this at the end of each day, ready for the next day. These then go alongside scheduled events (meetings / appointments etc). I settled on this after messing around with todo apps, todo.txt, spreadsheets, pens and paper, org mode, post it notes, etc etc.

If you just trust in your own mind, it will manage priority for you and get better the more you trust it. You rarely forget important things (they have an immediate need and make it known). Small stuff just mentally shuffles themselves to the back of the mind, if a few fall off the table, it's not going to cause any significant impact.

Doing this removes all the guilt of having big lists that need daily attention (where you feel you need a todo list to manage your todo list). This way I know I am tackling the important things, which are also what make me feel better as I know I have made an impact on my day. I am not going to start / end the day with a list of everything I have not done yet.

This feels like a much more human experience to me. As they say 'don't sweat the small stuff'

[lmm]

> If you just trust in your own mind, it will manage priority for you and get better the more you trust it. You rarely forget important things (they have an immediate need and make it known). Small stuff just mentally shuffles themselves to the back of the mind, if a few fall off the table, it's not going to cause any significant impact.

I find the small stuff a constant drag on my attention, like a headache, and if I have some hugely important thing then that's even worse - I can't think about anything else. Putting stuff in a list and trusting myself to handle the list lets me focus on what I'm currently doing without worrying about forgetting something that I can't currently do anything about. Using technology to make our lives easier is also a very human experience :).

But I don't feel guilt from my lists - I separate the stuff I need to do from the stuff I might want to do one day, and I recognise that most of the latter will never get done and prune things off it pretty aggressively.

[harryf]

Have a similar approach. I finally gave up using these type of apps (or lists in general) when top of my list of TODOs became “Review all these TODOs”. Also the fact that most of the apps required I spend more time playing with the UI than pen and paper annoyed me deeply.

Since then I just keep a list of 3-5 topics in my head that are important to me at some level and that’s it. It's a list of "these are the things I actually care about".

The underlying realization is: you can't get everything done. We're probably deluded by that brief period in our lives - as a student or early in our careers- where it was actually possible to get everything done, because we were being given so little responsibility to manage. The moment you become in some way "successful", leading a team, being a parent or whatever, your TODOs will far outweigh the time you have available to get them all done. Plus anyone working in startups / digital will always work in a space where the amount of useful work that could be done vastly exceeds the available time to do them.

The answer to me is we need software that makes us "smarter" in managing what's most important - our time. One example of this to me was Google Inbox, which for a brief year or two actually made me feel like I was managing my email in a clever way, enabling me to "scale up" and not waste time on the tool. And sadly Google killed it while pretending they'd ported the "best features" to GMail...

And unfortunately there's a big problem I see in software in general. There doesn't seem to be enough money in building things that make people "smarter", truly more efficient. The money seems to be in making things addictive... so I'll stick to the list in my head.

[Dyac]

Regarding Google Inbox, I felt exactly the same way.

The original designer of inbox actually released a chrome extension a couple of years ago which brings much of the experience back.

It's not a perfect clone, but it helps a lot. https://simpl.fyi/