At work and in personal life I feel more organized and in control when I have almost every task noted down in various lists of my task management tool. I have wondered what happens if I don't do this. There are a few clear negatives that come to my mind:
- I will miss deadlines, which would have consequences
- I might not be able to prioritize long term goals well which will add to my stress level
- Connected to first, even if I am not missing any deadlines, I will have constant feelings of anxiety around missing one or other task
But just the thought to leave lists has made me go deeper in a few ideas that I wouldn't have done otherwise.
First is around organic prioritization. In stable conditions many less important things get naturally deprioritized and important things raise their hands without needing a task list. This also leads to faster turn-around-time for smaller tasks since they don't go through sprint-like cycles. This is not completely reliable for medium to long term goals but it's an extremely low overhead approach for prioritization and working.
Second is about how we utilize state-of-mind context while creating a new task in our mind. Without lists you not only [mentally] capture tasks, you also preserve the social and emotional context with them. Sure you can add labels, tags, and categories in your todo tool, but they will still give extremely crude approximations. Just think how poorly you saved the strong feeling of determination when someone inspired you to do extraordinary and your action was to make a todo item and look at it later.
Emotions fade away, environments change. Sometimes it's for the good. I don't want anyone to make me prioritize what they want me to do by just being around me in [a physical] office. But I feel there is a lot to miss out if we neutralize everything. Many times I have had strong impulses to write about a few ideas on this blog but I lose that when I put the tasks in my todo lists so I could take them up later. When I have given in to this writing drive, I have produced generally higher quality output and—more importantly—done that while being in a state of flow.
All the cases above seem like giving in to immediate emotions and situations without much regard for long term planning and prioritization. This is true. In fact this is exactly where neutered lists work well. They take the edge off of items and let you objectively decide what's the right thing to do and when. But I believe we should respect and selectively feel such edges since they are sources of true creative differences. Instead of thinking of the list-less task management approach merely as a short-term-work hack, I want to consider this as an opportunity to create a system that carries over these edges for longer duration, merging them with long term goal planning.
Such a system could still keep a core of plain nested lists adorned with complex metadata, but will have a layer that captures much richer context and induces emotions later during prioritization and execution, as needed, based on the long term goals.