I remember my early post-adolescent years, when I loved to feel important, grown-up, and useful to society by adding my banalities to notepads, calendars, and reminder apps. My life was simple, and by extension, my digital organization was too: as much as I wanted to complicate myself, there really wasn’t that much to manage.
responsibilities in the form of open eyelashes in the brain (“What day did they charge the car insurance? Are we going to reach the term that the client demands? When did they give mom the results from the hospital?”) They came along over the years and there came a time when there was simply enough to manage.
And then came the mother of all complications.
like headless chickens
The day comes when you discover a successful task application with a very attractive minimalist interface. Then it turns out that there is another one that manages the tags better. Then come note-taking apps. One day you’re a nerd who doesn’t know what you’re missing if you’re not using Evernote, and the next day Evernote seems like an indicator that someone has fallen behind and isn’t embracing change.
And so with any pretty application or service that suddenly becomes fashionable and the productivity morons run in droves to assume from the beginning.
This cycle has been repeated several times over the last decade. Todoist, Omnifocus, Simplenote, Things, Clear, Ulysses, Fantastical, Trello, Asana, Spark, AirTable… A lot of proposals that at some point made us appreciate those changes. And in some cases, I include myself, wasting too much time running around like a headless chicken from service to servicemaking changes to see if that change could offer me a marginal increase in my productivity.
Until you find out that there is nothing less productive than jumping from productivity app to productivity appwasting time along the way for a result that maybe once or twice is fine, but from then on it will be a mere vice.
Those cases where testing productivity apps is and hobbybut not something that is improving our ability to work or giving us more free time. On the contrary: it takes it away from us.
There is nothing wrong with that either as long as we are aware. Like someone who enjoys going on sales, hunting for bargains, and always ends up spending more money than if they stayed at home and limited themselves to shopping when needed. That person is not doing it wrong if he is aware that he is not saving, but spending time in a way that he enjoys.
The same with those of us who need to know what is going on in that productivity market, It’s just that there’s a gap between testing promising apps and making complete moves between them.. Now I use Todoist because it is the most versatile and cross-platform, as well as being very generous in its free version. Now I try Things attracted by its design. Now I hear that ClickUp is extremely powerful and maintains a good interface. I glance sideways at TickTick. I fall into the worst vice in the search for productivity: wasting time.
It’s not that different from paralysis by analysis, the first nail in the coffin of efficiency. Observe, try, compare but do not decide. Want to boot but unable to.
And the worst, long moves of content from one app to another.
In the background, laughing, those who They always understood that simplicity was going to win and that nowhere was going to be better than stillsomething that has made them lose much less time moving and face fewer learning curves.
Of course: the fact that Artificial Intelligence is beginning to reach productivity applications does not help to disengage, but rather contributes to the terrible FOMO of feeling that we are wasting possibilities.
I leave it whenever I want. But I do not want.
