At the prompting of Vincent, I went the entire month of September without using a task manager. To set this up, you have to understand that I have tried every task manager you can think of: Apple Reminders, Things 3, Omnifocus, TickTick, Todoist, Microsoft Todo, Bullet Journaling, Field Notes, and the list goes on and on and on (how many of you sang that line as if you were Journey?).

I like the simplicity of pen and paper. Problem is I don’t always have pen and paper on me. I’ve tried fixing that by keeping a pen in my pocket at all times. I also try to carry a pocket notebook with me.

Things 3 has some major issues with it but I won’t go into that here. Omnifocus is too much. Its way more than I need in a task manager. TickTick and Todoist are great because they’re universal. Meaning they’re on Apple, PC, web-based, it doesn’t matter. They’re always around. But for some reason, I struggled with using them. TickTick is better in my opinion and I would go that route if I needed to. Apple reminders is the easiest because its always with me since I carry an iPhone. That’s the one I usually always use, especially now that they have made the recent changes to it (smart lists, natural language input, etc).

The problem I was having, though, was I was ignoring the reminder. I would have something pop up on my screen that was due and I would ignore it. I would do it whenever I got to it. That may be later that day or it might be several days or weeks in the future. Or I would do something because I knew it needed to be done without looking at the phone. Then it might get checked as done later that day. Often, though, it was a while in the futre.

This is where Vincent came into the picture. He made mention one day on Micro.blog that he only had a handful of apps on his phone. It got me curious and interested. Then we started discussing project management apps and he said he just remembers what needs to be done and does it. The challenge was thrown out for me to go an entire month without using a project management app. I must say, I felt like it was a success for the most part. I’m not sure if there was anxiety because I’ve used a “system” for so long or if I really did need a reminder at certain times of the month.

I will say, this, I did get everything done that needed to get done. It showed me that perhaps I am putting too much emphasis and work into a system instead of actually doing that work and getting real stuff done. I’m not sure what this means going forward. I’m still playing around with the pen/paper idea. Perhaps writing things down that needs to get done (critical stuff) and marking them off when they’re complete. I did realize that I don’t think I need a time-based reminder system.

All-in-all, this was a good experiment for me to do. For so long I spent time working on the perfect system that it effected how I got stuff done. I learned a lot and hopefully I can take this knowledge going forward.