Forget To-Do-Lists, use this simple tool instead

Photo by Wonderlane on Unsplash

For quite some time now I have — more or less desperately — been trying to find a task planning tool that is really working for me. After the usual suspects — Outlook, Reminders (on Mac and iOS) and some other wrong ways — I finally met Omnifocus. This is a really great tool that is based on the principles of Getting Things Done, the famous method that is described in detail in the book by David Allen.

I won’t get into too many details here. For many years, Omnifocus was the tool of my choice, the place where I put all my tasks and stuff. It became the place where I started my day and where I finished it. Both the Mac and the iOs app are great and working without a glitch. It allowed me to bring a clear structure into the mess that was my usual working day. The inbox and perspectives were the most useful functionalities for me. And synchronizing the data between my MacBook, iPad and iPhone was working pretty well and made sure that I never missed an important task.

So I should have been happy.

But I wasn’t.

Instead, I noted with growing irritation that I hit the “defer” button more and more often. At the end of each day, there were still a whole lot of items left on the list. So in order to avoid the dreaded red items, I simply shifted the due dates to the next day. And then the day…