Many people have likely gone through a period in their lives when life started demanding more than before. To meet these new demands, you need different tools for managing time and tasks. People start buying various task management, project management, and note-taking apps, and so on. What’s the result? Burnout. Sound familiar?

Collecting Everything We Can. Why Does It Feel Like a Burden?

Have you read David Allen’s book GTD (Getting Things Done)? It’s possibly one of the first books recommended by bloggers for becoming a productivity guru. There’s a piece of advice in it about the Inbox—recording everything that comes to mind in the “Inbox” folder to deal with later. Then, during the weekly review, we distribute tasks into folders, dates, and labels. The tasks pile up so much that it becomes overwhelming, and a slight sense of anxiety creeps in as soon as we open our task vault. Adding a task to the system is very (too) easy, but deleting it? Not so much, because there’s always a reason to come back to it later.

Handwriting tasks—for example, using a Bullet Journal for daily tasks—can be a great way to add meaning to the process. Writing down a task by hand requires much more effort than just clicking a button to save an interesting link to your tasks.

But It’s the 21st Century

Yes, writing down all your tasks by hand isn’t for everyone. It takes a lot of time and doesn’t allow for creating templates. Using digital technology won’t give us an advantage by itself because it doesn’t add mindfulness. In fact, the opposite is true—too easy access to all our tasks reduces our mindfulness and drowns us in an avalanche of information as soon as we dive into our phones. We don’t really want to turn off all notifications on our phones and make our smartphones dumb, do we? The situation isn’t much better with computers.

An Alternative

I’ve already written an article — ToDo List as checklist, not Task Manager which describes one way to use a task manager. In short, we turn our to-do list from a planning center into a supplement to the main system and create effective checklists that ensure nothing is overlooked.