When Your Task List Starts Running Your Life
Many of us use task managers like Apple Reminders, Things, or Todoist.
We open our task app hoping for clarity… and instead get a knot in our stomach.
Instead of being a helpful tool, our task manager has become an unmerciful taskmaster.
We feel pressure to get everything on the list done and beat ourselves up when we don’t.
Instead of reducing stress by helping us to remember, it increases our stress level.
But there are ways to use the task manager that are helpful and avoid stress.
Like to know how?
The Real Purpose of a Task Manager
Popular productivity author David Allen said in his seminal book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity ,
“Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.”
That’s what task managers are designed to do: get ideas or tasks out of your mind (so you don’t have to use mental energy to remember them) and into an external system that will remind you of them when you need to know.
That’s an excellent function for a task manager. It’s why so many of us use task managers.
How a Good System Turns Bad
But that only works if we treat our task manager as a memory tool—not as a daily scorecard of our worth.
Depending on how we view a task manager, it can become a source of stress, frustration, and negativity. As Paul Loomans says in I’ve Got Time: A Zen Monk’s Guide to a Calm, Focused and Meaningful Life ,
“A to-do list causes stress because it is a must-do list. Time and again you see what you have not yet done.”
Instead of being a useful tool, it becomes a harsh task master.
It’s easy to load up your task manager with so many items that it’s impossible to do everything. If you try, it will defeat you, and you’ll feel like a failure because you couldn’t do it all.
There are techniques you can use to keep a task manager as a helpful tool, not a source of stress.
Three Ways to Make Your Task Manager Work for You
Here are three ways to shift from a stressful task system to a supportive one.
1. Treat It Like a Menu, Not a Mandate
Look at the list of tasks when planning your day and pick from it what you want to do that day.
Making the shift from seeing a task manager as a “must-do list” to a “list of tasks ” makes a big mental difference.
Instead of being your Master, it becomes your servant. As Oliver Burkeman wrote in Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts ,
“It’s surprising how many things do become more appetizing once you’re encountering them not as chores you have to plow through, but as options you get to pick.”
2. Choose Your Timing
Some tasks are locked into specific time periods. If you’re doing a presentation, it’s a time block on your calendar.
But many, if not most, of our tasks are not time-bound. It doesn’t matter when during the day we do them.
List the tasks you want to do for the day, but allow yourself the flexibility to choose the order and timing of the tasks. This will enable you to consider your desire, energy, and motivation throughout your day.
In my workflow, I use Apple Reminders as my primary task manager. I use the NotePlan app to plan my day. My Reminders tasks appear in a panel on the right side of the NotePlan layout, and I can drag the ones I intend to do that day over to my daily planning note.
My planning note is a template that lists three task priorities: Priority Action, Today’s Actions, and Possible Actions. When I select the tasks I intend to do that day, I place them under the category I feel is appropriate.
I don’t typically time-block these tasks or do them in the order they are listed. Instead, I give myself the flexibility and control to choose when I’ll do tasks. Since I have the most energy in the morning, I’ll typically tackle the more difficult tasks then. I leave the less demanding tasks for the afternoon, when I have less energy.
If I get to the end of the day and I haven’t done a task, I drag it to a different date, and it will reappear then on my “list of tasks.”
3. Limit What’s on Today’s Plate
Some pick three tasks and list those as their tasks for the day. If they complete those early and still have time, they go to the master list of tasks and pick something else to work on.
Limiting the number of tasks you keep in front of you for your day helps to avoid the “unending lists of tasks” that make you feel stressed out.
With all three of these approaches, you’re not turning the task manager into a must-do list; rather, you’re making it more flexible. It’s a list of possible tasks that you can do for that day that you can pick for that day. And then you give yourself the flexibility to pick when during the day you’ll do those tasks.
A Better Way Forward
A task manager isn’t there to interrogate you every morning.
It’s there to support you.
When you treat it as a menu of possibilities instead of a list of demands, it gives you freedom—not pressure.
If your task manager has become a taskmaster, try these three tips to change how you think:
1. Pick three tasks for today.
2. Move anything else off your plate without guilt.
3. Choose when to do each task based on your energy, not the clock.
AI Note: I wrote this blog post myself, using my own words and thoughts for the initial draft. I used AI only to suggest headlines, section headings, images, and text improvements.
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