There Are No To-Do Apps Better Than Pen and Paper

Or avoiding the list of lists.

Every few months I go through an exercise where I try to find a to-do list that works. I’ve done this for years, the forest of to-do apps is littered with my abandoned tasks. There seems to be two ways to make a to-do list, spend hours thinking of how to add your spin on how to manage tasks or spend hours re-skinning what is already out there, resulting in our current Goldilocks situation where none fit quite right. They’re too complicated, too simple, too ugly, or too slick. I know I’m not the only one with this problem, [here], [here], and [here]. What’s shocking is how often advice outside of LifeHacker says don’t make lists. But the reality is that without a list I forget stuff, sometimes important stuff.

Probably because I’m contrarian by nature, my main requirement for a to-do list is that there isn’t a list of my various lists on the left hand side of whatever app I’m using. The ubiquity of the list of lists is shocking, it’s an easy solution but one that’s too rigid. You can’t get a good view of everything across various lists without getting a giant unmanageable list, and there is nothing worse for productivity than a giant list. From a UI perspective, they function only as a toggle, giving you no actionable information, meaning it’s either a waste of space on a large screen or awkward on a small screen. Lastly it’s what we’ve always done, the left rail stems from paper lists and menu trees and, damn it, in 2013, when we have crazy thin space-age computers in our pockets we should be able to do better.

Other requirements for a good to-do list app are a high-level view of everything like Teux Deux, the Focus Area and graphic approach of Action Method, the daily review of Any.Do (Gmail integration would be nice too), and a dash of the power features present in any GTD app. Most importantly, I don’t want it to feel rigid. It should be a tool to help evaluate decisions on spending time, not force them on me.