The endless search for a task tracker
I have tried lots of different ways to track tasks, or have a to do list, and they have all failed at some point.
This was prompted by the article “I Tried Every Todo App and Ended Up With a .txt File”. I have been on that same journey multiple times and I think it will be a continuous search.
I know I have written about some of them on this blog before. I have written about how great a new piece of software is and how it might be the “one”. And then a few weeks later I find that I no longer use it.
Up until recently I thought Obsidian was the answer. I was using it for a lot of different things including tracking tasks. However it slowly became a chore - it took a while to open, you had to find the correct file, the syncing across devices was fiddly (the paid sync is a bit expensive for how much I use it).
For my work tasks I am currently using a Miro board that mimics the Eisenhower Matrix using post it notes.
At the moment this seems to be working and I am getting things done and roughly in the right order.
However I think this is also likely doomed to fail.
Our brains like novelty. If I have a todo list, whatever form it takes, for a while it is novel. We like using it and it seems to solve our problem. Over time, it becomes familiar and we don’t get a dopamine rush when we open it. We actually get the opposite, a feeling of dread, as it is a list of things we have to do.
So maybe the answer is that there is not one solution to the task list problem. Maybe the answer is to rotate tools when it becomes too familiar?
Let me just add a post it note to my Miro board to remind me to check in a few months time 😉
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