Forget To-Do-Lists, use this simple tool instead
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 after. And so on.
I have to admit that it took a couple of years since I finally realized that I was not using this great tool as it was intended. I was not using it at all, I have to admit.
That was the point where I started to think about my way of organizing the stack of tasks I have on my desk. I needed to get control. Until then I was — as so many poor souls out there — driven by events, by tasks that got dropped on my (virtual) desk. All I was doing was responding. There was no agency in that.
In this precarious situation, I remembered a tool I had been using years ago for brainstorming and basic team collaboration: Trello. Trello is a platform where you can build and work with kanban boards. If you don’t know this Japanese technique yet: it simply consists of columns of cards that each stands for a single task. You can arrange them horizontally and/or vertically.
