Comment by imranq
6 months ago
People basically want a life coach, someone by their side who can tell them what the best next thing to do is at any given moment. Everything else are just approximation of that ideal.
The author's .txt file works because its simplicity forces a daily ritual of self-coaching. The tool demands that the user manually review, prioritize, and decide what matters. There are no features to hide behind, only the discipline of the process itself.
The impulse to use complex apps or build custom scripts is the attempt to engineer a better coach. We try to automate the prioritization and reminders, hoping the system can do the coaching for us.
The great trap, of course, is when we fall in love with engineering the system instead of doing the work. This turns productivity into a sophisticated form of procrastination.
Ultimately, the best system is the one that removes the most friction between decision and action. For the author, that meant stripping away everything but the list itself.
I was a really big fan of taskwarrior for the simple reason that it did do an approximation of telling you the best thing by calculating urgency, based on a simple weighting method where "the most urgent tasks" blocked other tasks, were due soon, had extra tags, had dependents, and were the oldest.
But I do feel very strongly that people only jump into "the great trap" because they feel that they were let down by their system, or that it didn't quite model their life accurately. A lot of todo apps are opinionated and those opinions, if incompatible with the the person using them, will lead to frustration. The quest for a more perfect life model often continues when this incompatibility is found.
This is accurate. It's about having something that works with your specific personality type.
That's why I personally just give some instructions to an LLM and create a simple scrapy HTML app that does exactly what I need.
Everything you are saying was something I suspected to be true - I think you've captured it brilliantly. Really like: "Ultimately, the best system is the one that removes the most friction between decision and action."
> Ultimately, the best system is the one that removes the most friction between decision and action. For the author, that meant stripping away everything but the list itself.
this ↑ a 1000x ↑