I have tried just about every “to-do” app under the sun. I’ve used Microsoft To-Do, Reminders, Google’s To-Do feature, Notion, Planner, Miro, old school pen and paper, you name it. I think I’m defaulting to just a blank text file.
I like a project manager tools. I like to be public about progress wherever possible. However, a few months back I started writing my stand up notes in a blank file instead of OneNote. I needed a quick reference spot for the things I was working on and it felt too easy to put them in OneNote and then get lost in the tabs and pages, only to forget what I was doing in the first place. The blank text file made things easy for me so I’ve been doing that for awhile.
Just today I was thinking to myself, “I need to catch up on laundry, take the trash out, play some Destiny, walk the dogs” and I reached for my phone to write this down and thought, “where am I going to put this information…why does it need to be on my phone?” I’m either at my desk or have my laptop on me the majority of the time…let me just open a text file. I opened VS code, wrote some stuff down, saved it to my external drive and boom. Done.
Every tech company has developed some version of task tracking. Most coding tutorials start with a task app because it covers so much ground in getting your feet wet in any language. However, I think the idea that tasks should go into an app on the most distracting device any of us own, for me, doesn’t work very well. Old school pen and paper works pretty well but I’ll admit that throwing out a sheet when I want a fresh one is kinda meh. OneNote works pretty well but again, feels overkill for what I need it to do.
So I’m going to do this for awhile and we will see how it ends up.