I would wager that taking a shower and brushing your teeth are not something you think about. They are autonomous and there is no chance that you would forget to do them.
If you listed the things you do each day that are recurring tasks but aren’t autonomous, you would be surprised how many things you have to remember. Unlike taking a shower, the same can’t be said for taking out the trash.
Recurring, but not autonomous, tasks over-extend our short term memory and create pervasive stress. Short term memory is for remembering a phone number while you write it down, not a semi-permanent list of things to do and when they need to be done.
Getting to a breaking point, I set out to relieve myself of stress by freeing up my short term memory from things it doesn’t need to keep track of and getting more things done on time.
History Lesson
Getting things out of our heads is vital in this modern age. When people were subsistence farmers, to-do lists probably consisted of a couple things and there was little variation day to day. To-do lists would have been your daily routine for survival and relied little on your memory.
Modern Memory Abuse
Fast forward to today where life is a lot more complicated. We have to balance remembering to accomplish an endless list of one-off tasks like “check car tire pressure”, “pick up dry cleaning”, and “fertilize lawn”, with routine bodily maintenance like flossing. Then you can add in more frequent intra-day reminders to check your email, social media, and news, and it is a surprise that our heads don’t explode.
This is all a lot to keep in our head and it is all being stored in the worst place to keep it: short term memory. The storage space for our short term memory is overwhelmed with modern life, it was not made to keep track of so many things. By overusing it, we end up keeping ourselves in a pervasive stressful state by worrying if we forgot to do something. Many times you spend more time thinking about a task than doing it.
To-do lists can be used to keep track of things to be done but this is not applicable to all tasks. There are many different classifications that I have identified which all need different tools to manage productively.
Routine and Recurring Tasks
I have a lot of things I do throughout the week that I used to keep in my head because they felt weird to track using other means. For instance, remembering to take the trash bin out to the street the day before pick-up or flossing my teeth.
Calendar notifications were too easy to miss and to-do lists felt inappropriate due to the recurring and habitual nature of the tasks. What I needed was something that wouldn’t let me forget and didn’t interfere with the rest of my constantly shifting task lists.
Due is an iOS/iPadOS app that reminds me every five minutes to do something until it is done. The persistence of the notifications is vital because it is impossible to forget to do the task.
Because this app is solely made to remind you to do something, there is no temptation to commingle a routine reminder to floss your teeth with a one-off task of calling your insurance agent.
The perfect tasks for this app are life routines and chores, the things your parents used to nag to you do as a kid.
Habits
Next are tasks that are less mundane things that you should do but don’t always want to do. These include positive habits like exercise, meditation, prayer, and journaling. While Due is perfectly fine for these routines, not accomplishing them should have a negative association to it. Being good about habitually doing them should be rewarding.
True to the name, Habitify is multi-platform app (Web/iOS/Android/Mac) made to help you build positive habits through reminders and keeping track of the history of accomplishments. Seeing your history of completing the task helps to motivate you to continue building them as habits.
While it is a premium app in terms of pricing with either a $25 per year subscription or $40 one-off purchase, the habits formed make up for the cost. After all, what good is exercise equipment or a gym membership if you never use them?
Use it or Lose It Tasks
Next, there are tasks that I don’t want to stress about remembering but don’t fret about if they don’t get done. These include checking my email (work and personal) three times per day and a mental break to read my RSS feeds. These tasks are unimportant if they’re missed and gentle reminder is all that is necessary.
The tasks don’t need to be done so using Due is over bearing. They aren’t habits so Habitify won’t work. The tool for the job that has worked sufficiently is adding calendar events for the following “events”:
- Look away from screen every few minutes to rest eyes
- Take mental break
- Check email or social media
Using the Pomodoro method with a set schedule may work and I will be exploring alternatives as a calendar can get messy.
Whenever Tasks
We finally get to the ever popular to-do list appropriate tasks. These are things that need doing at any point and are not recurring often enough to be routine. Picking up dry cleaning or making an appointment are things I need to get out of my head but don’t fit into the other categories.
For these miscellaneous tasks I choose Things for MacOS/iOS because it gives me the command to-do list functionality with a lighter version of the Getting Things Done framework. By forcing you to categorize tasks under one of Inbox, Today, Anytime, and Someday, it gives me organization over the miscellany that I need to do. Additional features for recurring and scheduling to-dos give flexibility for things that don’t quite fit into the Routine or standard calendar event categories.
Summary
Forcing myself to get tasks out of my head and into these systems has freed up my short term memory for its true purpose and relieved me of a constant undercurrent of stress. While each app mentioned has an alternative that you could swap out, the categories mentioned will help frame all the different things that we need to do in our lives and how they should be managed, regardless of which software or system you use.
Your life will feel less chaotic when you stop misusing your brain. You may even fall asleep easier.