You will be able to pick a task app and calendar based on a short list of needs and stop switching.
A colleague tells you about a new task app. It has tags, priorities, a built-in calendar, AI scheduling and a beautiful dark mode. You give it your Saturday afternoon. The lists get imported and every project gets its own colour. By Wednesday you are back to the old app, or to a notebook, because the new one asked too many questions every time you added a task. Two months later, someone mentions another app.
If this sounds familiar, you've turned tools into a hobby. It's a pleasant hobby, and it feels like progress. This lesson is about getting off that loop and picking tools you can stop thinking about.
For most people, the whole system from this course runs on three things: a task list, a calendar and a place for notes.
The task list holds your next actions, projects, waiting-for items and someday ideas, as you set up in lesson 2.4. The calendar holds fixed commitments and your time blocks. Anything that isn't a task yet, from meeting notes to a half-formed idea, goes in notes.
That's it. Many people add more, such as a project management tool their team uses, a habit tracker or a separate journal. Those can help, but none is required, and each one adds a place you have to check.
Paper works too. A notebook for tasks and notes, plus the calendar you already use at work, is a perfectly good system. Some people find paper better for focus, because opening a notebook doesn't come with notifications. The drawback is capture on the go and searching old notes, so paper users often keep a phone note for quick capture and copy it into the notebook daily.
There are many good tools, and they change quickly, so treat these as examples rather than recommendations. For tasks, people use Todoist, TickTick, Microsoft To Do, Apple Reminders or Notion, among many others. For calendars, most people use whatever their workplace runs, usually Google Calendar or Outlook. For notes, the notes app on your phone, OneNote, Notion or a paper notebook all work.
If your company uses Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, there's a good argument for using the task and notes tools that come with it, since they connect to your work email and calendar. If you keep personal and work tasks in one place, check your company's rules first: some workplaces don't allow work information in personal apps, and that is a rule to take seriously.
AI assistants can also help with planning and email, but how to use them well is a subject of its own. It's covered in the course AI at work: writing, research, spreadsheets and meetings.
Rather than comparing features, check any tool against four needs.
First, quick capture on your phone. Can you add a task in a few seconds, from your lock screen or with one tap, while standing on the MRT? If capture is slow, you'll stop capturing, and the system will stop being trusted.
Second, it works where your job does. If your work lives in Outlook and Teams, a task tool that connects to them, or at least sits comfortably beside them, is easier to keep up than one that lives in a separate world. If you can't install apps on your work laptop, a web or phone app may be the only option.
Third, reminders. Can it remind you of a task on a date, or at a time? Waiting-for items and deferred emails depend on this.
Fourth, easy review. Can you see all your next actions, your projects and your waiting-for list quickly, in a form that is pleasant enough to read through each week? The weekly review in lesson 8.2 depends on it.
Write your four needs in your own words. If your current tools meet them, keep them. If one fails a need badly, replace that one tool and leave the rest of the system alone.
Switching apps feels productive. You learn something new, you tidy your lists as you move them, and for a few days the new tool is exciting. But each switch costs you something you've been building: trust in the system. During the move, some tasks end up in the old app and some in the new. For a while you aren't sure where anything is. Lesson 2.1, Why your head is a bad place to keep tasks, explained why that uncertainty sends tasks back into your head.
There's also the time. A new tool has to be set up and learned, and your data has to move across, which can easily eat a weekend. That's time spent on the system rather than on the work the system is meant to support.
So once you've chosen, commit for at least three months. That's long enough to learn the tool properly, run a dozen weekly reviews in it, and find out what actually bothers you rather than what looked appealing in a comparison video. If something really doesn't work after three months, change it then, deliberately, during a weekly review.
Priya had used four task apps in two years. When she checked her current one against the four needs, it passed all of them. Her real problem had been that she never reviewed it. She deleted two other apps from her phone and put the weekly review on her calendar instead.
Before you consider any change, write down your four needs and check your current tools against them, honestly.
Write your four tool needs and check whether your current tools meet them before considering any change.
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