Quick test: think of something you promised a colleague last week. Where is that commitment written down, right now? If it takes you more than one guess, keep reading.
Most people don’t lack a todo list. They have too many of them: a flagged email here, a post-it there, a pinned Slack message, a mental note. Each one representing a real commitment or expectation. But scattered like that, none of them can be trusted, and an untrusted system is one you have to double-check.
A todo list is supposed to offload your brain, not create more work for it.
The fix is not a better app. It is deciding that your commitments live in exactly one place, and demoting every other place to that of an inbox: somewhere a todo can land and make a stopover, never somewhere it stays.
What constitutes an inbox isn’t always obvious, though. To help identify them, here are seven places where I most often find todos living, and why they all fail.
1. Your inbox
The classic. The email is the task, so surely the inbox can hold it?
The problem is that other people control your inbox. Your commitment competes for attention with newsletters, calendar invites, and whatever lands next.
And before you say it, the mark-as-unread trick is nothing but a symptom of the problem: the todo is still in the inbox, and it’s still a place you don’t control.
2. Post-it notes
Excellent for capture, terrible for storage. There are always more tasks than there is time, so most tasks will sit undone for quite a while before their turn comes. That is normal. But a post-it doesn’t survive the wait: after a few days, your eyes start editing it out of the scenery, like furniture.
Everyone knows that one note that has been stuck to a monitor since before anyone can remember. It stopped being useful a long time ago.
3. Pinned chat messages
Slack and Teams both let you save messages for later, and the operative word is “later”: an ever-growing pile with no order and no way to mark anything done.
Chat tools are built for communicating what’s happening now. Commitments are about what we deliberately decide happens next.
4. Your calendar
The calendar is a precision tool: this exact room, this exact minute, these exact people. Its power comes from every entry meaning exactly that. Mix in entries that mean “it would be nice to work on this around now” and you dilute it, one maybe at a time, until every entry needs interpreting.
A calendar you have to interpret is a calendar you have stopped trusting.
Planning time to work on a task is fine — I do it often. But the task lives on the list, and the calendar only visualizes it for a day. It has to be that way, because there will never be time for everything you should or want to do.
A list holds everything you could do, a calendar only what you’ll actually do.
5. Browser tabs
Keeping a tab open as a reminder to read it or do something with it. Tab number forty carries no hint of why it’s open, the reminder only exists on the machine where you left it, and one forced browser update wipes the whole system.
Personally, this might be my own worst habit. But I’m improving!
6. TODO comments in your code
Version-controlled procrastination. A TODO comment marks where a problem is, never when — or whether — anyone will fix it. Grep any mature codebase and you’ll find TODOs old enough to have outlasted the person who wrote them.
And, honestly, when was the last time you searched for a TODO comment in your codebase? Or fixed one that you saw in passing? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
7. Your head
The most popular one, and arguably the worst. Your brain doesn’t file commitments away; it rehearses them, at random intervals of its own choosing, with a marked preference for 3 a.m. As David Allen puts it in Getting Things Done: your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.
It fails silently, too. A lost post-it might turn up behind the desk but a forgotten commitment leaves no trace at all. You will not know it was dropped until someone asks how it’s going.
The one redeeming quality of this particular inbox is how eagerly it empties: the nagging stops the moment you write the thing down somewhere you trust. Your brain doesn’t actually want to hold your todos. It just doesn’t dare let go until it believes someone else has them.
They all make fine inboxes
Here’s the thing, though: none of these places are the problem. Scribbling a post-it in a hallway conversation is good capturing. Pinning a Slack message mid-meeting is fast and frictionless. The failure is when the stopover becomes the destination.
Scattering tasks costs more than the occasional forgotten promise, too. If there is one thing a todo list should excel at, it is giving you an overview of everything on your plate, so that you can prioritize. Spread across systems, that overview doesn’t exist, and you end up weighing a flagged email against a post-it, comparing apples and pears. What you pick gets decided by chance and visibility, not importance.
Productivity is fundamentally about picking the right thing to work on, so that you can be comfortable with all the many things you thereby decide not to work on. That comfort cannot come from looking at just one inbox among many. However carefully you choose, the choice was made from a fraction of the whole, and a part of you knows it. You work on one thing while quietly wondering whether something more important is sitting in a place you didn’t look.
So pick one place where commitments live. Which one matters far less than it being just one place. A paper notebook beats five apps. Then make a routine of trawling your inboxes: go through the post-its, the flagged mails, the pinned messages, and move anything that’s an actual commitment into the one place. For me that’s a daily sweep, plus a few minutes after every meeting.
This is what makes the whole thing forgiving. Once the trawling is routine, you can capture as sloppily as you like, on whatever is closest, because everything funnels to the same place anyway. Sloppy capture, strict storage.
My one place
My personal preference for storing tasks is Todoist. Browser tabs and flagged emails still happen — I’m not disciplined enough at capture time to skip them, and I don’t need to be. But every one of them gets transferred and then archived, recycled, or unpinned.
The tool is the least interesting part of this. What matters is that when I wonder what the most important thing to work on is, there is only ever one answer.