I’m resorting to pen and paper to get a proper overview of all the “tasks” that I have assigned to me. Starting to question if digital task managers create work and black holes of stuff.

@philbowell I took the same step several months ago, proceeding under the same question. I'm really glad I took the step, and I'd encourage it to others... that said, I also wound up switching back to Things 3 a week or two ago. I think the digital approach genuinely works better for me, so long as I take steps to avoid black holes.

@spgreenhalgh @philbowell my sense is this is where David Allen is more right then he often gets credit: doesn’t matter what system you use, it won’t work if you’re not reviewing daily and weekly (at a minimum). My digital black holes emerge when I get busy and don’t take the 30-45 min on a Friday to sift through and look at everything.

@lukemperez that’s a good point well made. The issue I feel like I’m always battling is the way tasks are handled at work versus how I want to handle my tasks. I end up having to update things twice and then not doing either.

@philbowell when I had a job that didn’t permit me to use OnniFocus (I’ve been a user since ver 1), I did all my GTD in a moleskin that I kept in my desk. Confidential info related to the project was on a text file on the desktop so I could delete it when needed. In my digital management, I had work entries only for things I would think about when I wasn’t at work.

So on Mondays I usually took ten minutes to cross check everything. (Often I already had it in the moleskin but forgot.) Rarely did I have things Tue-Fri.

It wasn’t perfect but it was good enough that I discovered later my bosses thought I was more reliable than most of the staff in that office.

@philbowell Yeah, the ease of adding tasks to Things 3 was (and is!) a real problem, and that's precisely why I moved to paper for a few months. Maybe I'll find myself in that same situation in another 6 months, but in the meantime, Things just works better for me.