Last week I proposed a strategy for dealing with my to-do list. In the past, I’ve gone back and forth between apps and a notebook to track tasks. Last week, I looked for a system that was complete and manageable. I proposed adding todos to my calendar, to force myself to give reasonable estimates on how long it will take to complete tasks. Immediately after publishing last week’s post, I looked for a solution in an app called Todoist. To my delight, Todoist has the exact feature I was looking for: 2-way calendar sync.
Calendar Sync
You can add todo items in Todoist bound to a specific day. The app parses natural language so I can type “Send email to Kasey on Thursday” and it will add the task to Thursday’s list. With calendar sync, it also will add the task to my Google Calendar as all-day events. I can then go through and give the task a specific time and duration during the day.
This forces me to be reasonable. I know my computer graphics program will take multiple hours to complete, but it’s easy to get overambitious and think “AH YEAH I can finish that in the next hour!”. Putting tasks in the context of my schedule encourages me to be realistic in hopes of disappointing myself less.
One drawback with this system is that it makes me less flexible. I am less incentivized to spontaneously work on things outside of my schedule. These random bursts of inspiration have been an important part of my life (this blog was the result of a spontaneous idea a year ago), but I have committed to things and I need organization to not let people down. Perhaps this is what growing up is: becoming more boring in name of not letting people down.
Tasks on Apple Watch
Another benefit of this system is that tasks show up on my Apple Watch. Throughout the day, I don’t need to think about the full picture, my watch tells me what to do and I have a reasonable expectation that if I do everything it says, everything will get done.
So far so good. I’m using technology to ease my stress to make me more productive. Incredible.
