Balancing Simplicity and Utility in your Task Manager

I’ve tried many task managers, including OmniFocus, Things, and Apple Reminders.

I’ve found that with a task manager, it can be easy to overcomplicate how you manage and prioritize your tasks. There is an infinite number of contexts, folders, projects, areas, tags, and perspectives you can add to your setup.

All of this over-complication creates overhead in managing your task manager (it should be the other way around).

Over-simplifying, however, presents the opposite problem. If you try to keep your task management too simple then what works for you, it will be underpowered and make it difficult to prioritize the most important tasks that you need to get done next.

To maintain a balance, only use the features in your task manager that are necessary to get the right things done and no more. If you find your current system is underpowered, carefully use additional features sparingly. This will keep your overhead low and your weekly review simple.