[jvagner]

An old colleague of mine.. and CFO of our company.. used to manage his tasks on a piece of paper. It was always in his folder, and for each task he'd write a note on the paper and then draw a box around it. As he completed each task, he'd scratch out the box.

It was crude and messy and reminded me of high school.

A couple of years ago, I found myself migrating towards something like it. I use large index cards, but.. more or less, do the same thing.

I still have remnants of every to do app on my iPhone. In each app there's abandoned lists of tasks that got recorded and forgotten, or recorded and "re-prioritized", forever.

The nice thing about the card is, if it's mostly scratched out and there are things left on it, you can copy the items to a new, fresh card and then keep going. If the items aren't that important, it's as simple as throwing whole card away. It's satisfying and simple and there's no process-guilt involved.

"Throw card out" is a feature.

[joemaller1]

Re-copying the list to a new sheet of paper is a feature. It forces you to regularly re-prioritize items or choose to drop them altogether.

I kept a digital list for a few years, but eventually it just became a crap heap of undone tasks and abandoned ideas that would get batch re-scheduled forward forever. Paper lists work really well for me.

[moron4hire]

Yep. I've also got the zombie accounts and databases all over everywhere.

I like that the paper gets full and I have to copy it to a new sheet. It forces me to review the things on the list. Things that stay on the list naturally migrate to the top of the list. I start to notice them hanging out there, at the top, where they are the first reminder that they have been at the top of the list for so long.

The system has many emergent features.

[jmelloy]

That's how my boss does it. He pretty much has a notebook with him at all times, and any item on his todo list gets a line and a checkbox.

It serves him immensely well.