At my peak I was paying for, or fiddling with, eleven productivity apps. A task manager. A separate notes app. A project tool. A habit tracker. Two calendars, because of course. A "second brain" I spent more time organizing than using.
I told myself this was a system. It was a hobby. A very expensive, very time-consuming hobby that produced almost no actual work.
The day I deleted all of it and replaced it with one plain text file was the day I started getting things done. I'm not exaggerating, and I'm a little embarrassed about it.
A single, simple list beats a stack of apps because the friction of organizing your tools quietly becomes a substitute for doing the work. One list removes the friction, the decisions, and the false sense of progress that comes from arranging tasks instead of finishing them.
What the one list does:
Every app sold me the same dream: get this one right, and you'll finally be on top of things.
So I'd migrate. Spend a weekend setting up tags, color codes, nested projects, custom views. It felt incredible. Productive, even. I'd lean back and admire the structure.
Then nothing would change. The work was still there, still undone. Within a month the pristine system had decayed into the same mess as the last one, and I'd start eyeing the next app that promised to fix what the last one couldn't.
It took me longer than I'd like to admit to see the pattern. The setup was never the hard part. The setup was how I avoided the hard part. Organizing tasks gives you the dopamine of progress without the discomfort of actually doing them. Usability research from the Nielsen Norman Group keeps landing on the same lesson — every extra option is friction, and friction is where intent quietly leaks away. That realization became one of the pillars of the productivity system that finally survived my burnout.
It's almost insultingly simple. A single text file. One screen.
It has three parts, top to bottom:
That's it. No tags. No projects. No nesting four levels deep. When something comes up, it goes into one of three buckets, and the decision takes about one second.
Every morning I look at "Today" and it's short, because I keep it short on purpose. Every evening I move a few things up from "Soon." Things in "Someday" mostly sit there, which is exactly right — most of them never needed doing.
The magic isn't the structure. It's the absence of structure. There's nowhere to hide and nothing to fiddle with.
Here's the thing about all those features. Every option is a decision, and decisions are friction.
Which project does this belong to? What priority tag? Which view should I be in? Each tiny question is a moment where momentum leaks out. Stack up enough of them and "capture a task" becomes a ten-second chore you start avoiding. So tasks don't get captured, and the system you built to track everything tracks nothing.
A plain list has one decision: which of three buckets. That's so frictionless I actually use it, consistently, which is the only thing that has ever mattered. The same restraint is what made my habit tracker finally stick — the boring, forgiving version is the one you keep.
The best system isn't the one with the most features. It's the one you'll still be using next month.
There's a second benefit. You can't reorganize a plain list into procrastination. There are no settings to tweak, no views to perfect. The only thing you can do with it is look at the next task and do it. The tool gives you nowhere to escape to.
I won't pretend the switch was smooth. Around week two, I panicked.
It felt too simple. Surely I was forgetting something. Surely a real professional needed more than a text file. I caught myself browsing for a new app, the old itch flaring up. The list felt naked without all the machinery I was used to.
So I made a deal with myself: one more week, no new tools. If I dropped a ball, I'd reconsider.
I didn't drop a ball. What I dropped was the constant background anxiety of maintaining a system. By the end of that week the quiet was the point. I wasn't managing my productivity setup anymore. I was just working. The thing I'd been chasing through eleven apps was on the other side of using none of them.
A list is only as good as what's on it, and the thing that made mine reliable wasn't the structure — it was the habit of capturing everything the instant it appeared.
Before, my tasks lived in a dozen places: half in an app, half in my head, a few in random notes, some in messages I'd "deal with later." Nothing was complete, so I never fully trusted any of it, which meant I was always carrying a low hum of "am I forgetting something." That anxiety is exhausting, and it's the real cost of a scattered system.
With one list, the rule became simple: if it needs doing and it isn't on the list, it goes on the list, right now, in one of three buckets. The capture takes a second because there's no decision about where — just which of three. That speed is the whole point. A capture habit only sticks if it's frictionless, and a single plain list is about as frictionless as it gets.
The payoff is trust. Once everything genuinely lives in one place, the background anxiety goes quiet. My head stops trying to remember things because it knows the list has them. That mental quiet — not the productivity, exactly — was the part I didn't see coming.
A list you half-trust is worse than no list. A list you fully trust lets your mind finally let go.
The eleven apps could never give me that, because the information was always split across them. One boring list could, precisely because there was nowhere else for anything to hide.
Cutting the apps gave back more than I expected, and not just money on subscriptions.
I'm not anti-app. If a tool genuinely earns its place in your day, keep it. Some teams truly need shared project software, and that's fine. But for my own work, the moment I stopped optimizing the container and started doing the contents, everything got easier. The container was the distraction the whole time.
If trading complexity for one boring list sounds freeing, it's worth seeing how the same minimal-by-default mindset reshapes the rest of a working week.
Q: Doesn't a plain list fall apart when you have a lot to track? Less than you'd think. The "Someday" bucket absorbs the long tail, and most of it never needs action. If a real project needs more structure, give that one project a heading. You rarely need an entire app for it.
Q: What about reminders and due dates? Genuine time-bound things — a meeting, a deadline — go in a calendar, which is the one tool that earns its place. Everything else lives on the list and doesn't need a notification nagging me.
Q: Isn't this just a to-do list with extra rules? Yes, basically. That's the point. The "extra rules" are mostly about keeping it simple and resisting the urge to complicate it. The discipline is in the restraint.
Q: What app should I use for the one list? Whatever opens fastest and gets out of your way — a plain notes app, a text file, even paper. Pick the most boring option. Boring tools don't tempt you to play with them.
I spent years believing the right app would make me productive. The right app was no app. A single list, short and stupidly simple, did what eleven tools couldn't: it got out of the way.
Stop building the perfect system. The perfect system is the one boring enough that you forget it exists and just do the work.
If you're between productivity apps right now, hunting for the next one, try the opposite. Delete them. Open one blank list. See how much of the problem was never the tool.
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