The Perfect To-Do System Is Not Just Around the Corner

Sometimes it’s as if you can almost sense its nearness — that perfect to-do system, built on OmniFocus, Things, Asana, Todoist, or one of the many others. It’ll take just a little more thinking and tweaking. Rationalize your tagging system, change how you think about due dates, maybe write some scripts or create more templates, and you’ll have it.

And it will be so glorious! And you’ll never have to deal with this again. (You swear you’re not one of those people who futz with their to-do thing just because it’s fun.)

But Nope

Here’s what you need to know: it’s a mirage.

I know, I know. How can that be, when it feels so damn near? We’re just talking about lists and a few ways — time and tags, for instance — of slicing them up. I know perfection is right here. Give me another day! I’ve so got this!

But it’s not around the corner. It’s really not. There’s no perfect system for anybody. All of these apps are pretty good, and you may find one fits you better than another, but you’re not ever going to make it the perfect system for you. Even if you started from scratch and wrote your own, you’re not getting the perfect system.

There’s no getting out of this fact: these apps are all going to take more constant input from you than you’d wish for. They don’t take away the need for some amount of self-discipline to use them effectively.

I’m so very, very sorry.