Todo lists are a staple of personal and professional productivity. They keep us abreast of what tasks we have to perform in any given day or week and give us a plan of attack for our daily lives. However, there are many, many ToDo applications out there to choose from. I’ve seen some really great applications for managing responsibilities and I’ve seen some bad ones. But I’ve also found that if you spend too much time trying to find the perfect productivity, it can become a kind of drain that hilariously, hinders productivity!
One of the hallmarks of any geek is to find more efficient ways to accomplish tasks, but in our age of slickly styled, feature-rich productivity applications, it can become easy to get so caught up in figuring out what works for us that the search itself can steal away minutes, hours, or even days in finding what works best.
Now I’m not advocating you give up on keeping a ToDo. There are some great apps our there to be sure (Evernote, Things, and Remember The Milk come to mind). However, it’s important that if you’re going to explore the merits of some of these that you set limits for yourself. Say 20 minutes a day to try a new app, explore its feature set, and decide on whether it fits your schedule/lifestyle. Then give it a trial run and see if stands up to your demanding schedule. Try to give each one at least a week before writing it off and moving on to the next.
I’m as guilty as anyone else of this and kind of had a moment of realization this week while I was debating what I should use to track what I’m working on. Then it just kind of hit me that the important thing is that you don’t allow your quest for productivity become an outlet for you to avoid doing the things that you’d like to put off. It’d be like skipping work for a week solely to mull over a new car purchase to get you there.
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