Finding a to-do app for the ultimate procrastinator
Every shoe that I own has no shoelaces because I’m too lazy to tie them up.
On my search for a system that improves my productivity I came across David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done. The idea is simple: capture all the tasks and ideas that come to mind, clarify their meaning and importance, organize them into categories, reflect upon them regularly, and then engage with them according to priority. David Allen’s book has over 9k reviews on Amazon with a 4.5 star rating. While the idea is great, I’ve found myself struggling with a seamless implementation that works well.
I believe that the problem lies in my personality. For Myer Briggs, I’m an ISTP, with a strong emphasis on the P.
Perceiving-oriented individuals tend to plan less and adapt better to change.
This is a nice way to say I’m extremely disorganized and that I tend to leave things until the last minute. But I also don’t mind when things don’t go my way.
Hard to trick into productivity
Another telling test is the Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin. I’m a “rebel”, this is the hardest personality to trick into being productive. Accountability buddies, deadlines, rewards, goal setting frameworks, etc don’t work well for me. I’m highly unstructured and work at my own pace.
With this in mind, I guess you can call me the ultimate procrastinator. But I’m willing to spend some hours to find a method that will save me planning hours in the future. To start this, let’s outline the foundational steps of David Allen’s GTD method.
The 10 GTD Moves
David Allen mentions paper a lot in his book. I don’t know when was the last time I wrote something on a piece of paper. Since everything is in my phone or my computer, I want to find an app that integrates well with what I have. I know there should be an app for this.
My wishlist for the perfect app
1. Low friction. I need to be able to capture everything easily. Every shoe that I own has no shoelaces because I’m too lazy to tie them up. If something takes more than 2 steps, I will convince myself that remembering it is easier than writing it down.
2. Flexibility: sometimes I want to assign priorities to something on the spot, sometimes I want to do it later.
3. Automatic mind sweep/reviews. I’ve never been the type to reflect on a day and set priorities for the next day. I will do it for a couple of days and then forget.
4. Automatic organization. We’re in the age of AI, it’s about time that someone takes this off my plate.
5. Easy to retrieve. I want to know what to do next as easily as I can check the time. Just a glance at my top right corner.
6. Automatic snooze. If I don’t mark something as done, the app should be able to reorganize my tasks and remind me to do the one that I missed at a later time.
The things that I track
Appointments
Unlike tasks, I do track appointments. Mostly because I spend most of my work day in meetings. If I have a personal appointment, there’s no way around it, I have to check my calendar. Tracking appointments is easy because I can set a cadence for recurring meetings on Google Calendar. The hard part is that nobody outside my company has access to my calendar, so I have to go through the manual process of creating non-work related appointments.
Slack messages
Instead of a todo list, I use the Slack message reminder feature to help me remember things. This is great for work, but I don’t have the luxury of using Slack for my personal life.
Both of these require very little effort on my part since they integrate with tools that I have to use for my job.
The search
After I knew exactly what I was looking for, I spent the next 5 weeks trying out every todo app I could find in the market, here’s the results nicely summarized in a table.
Steps to capture
Surprisingly, todo apps have come a long way from what I remember, almost every app has 2 steps to capture a simple task. Open app, type in task and type enter. Apps with a native desktop application have an advantage because I don’t have to remember a website. Same for those that seamlessly integrate with Google calendar.
Automatic prioritization
This is one thing that I really liked about Task.it. I don’t have to choose a time to do a task. The app automatically calculates when you should do something based on priority, urgency and deadline. Another feature that I loved is that you can schedule an event right now, in case something is very urgent.
Retrieval
For most apps, I have to check the specific app to see my todo list. The advantage of using Google Tasks and Task.it is that they get added to my calendar. My iPhone has a widget that shows my next event on my home screen. So I proclaim both the winners in this category.
Google Calendar integration
Thanks to Zapier, most applications can be integrated with Google Calendar if you create a workflow. However, I’m looking for an application that actually blocks the time on my calendar to perform the task.This is when things get complicated. Remember that I’m too lazy to tie my shoelaces? Imagine setting a time for each task, my brain doesn’t work that way, I don’t like planning ahead.
I’ve had some luck before doing time blocking. Carl Pullein explains it very well in this video. He continuously switches between Todoist and Google Calendar to make this work, but with Todoist’s integration to google calendar, he can visualize his tasks on the top and assign them to a block throughout the day.
Task.it does a very good job here too. Tasks get assigned automatically depending on your priority.