Start Fresh Everyday

One of the biggest problems I see with todo apps is that they automatically carry tasks from day to day.

If you don’t finish something on Tuesday, the app will move it to Wednesday.

It might still show as due on Tuesday, therefore overdue. But it shows on Wednesdays list of tasks.

This is bad.

First, it makes you less likely to plan small things. And the small things give you context for your day, and help order your mind. They are important.

Second, it makes you less conscious and present when planning each day. By definition. You’re just letting the todo app carry over uncompleted todos without thinking about them. A fully conscious approach makes you deliberately decide what you’ll do each day.

Third, these todos become noise in the system. Noise makes it harder to get a signal, to get the important things done, to even see what the important things are. And you’ll get rid of later than you want, and when you do you’ll feel bad that you’re not doing those todos.

The Alternative

It’s simple: choose consciously what you will do every day.

That choice must be made. It can be as simple as dragging a todo over from yesterday’s plan to today’s. You can type it up again when writing out today’s plan.

But because you’re making the choice, it will often be a different one.

• Maybe you’ll defer it for a couple days until you have the time to actually make it happen.
• Or maybe you’ll drop it altogether. Oftentimes, we don’t get to todos because, at some level, they just aren’t important. We may try to convince ourselves they are, but they aren’t.
• Or maybe you realize that the todo isn’t small enough. You’ve avoided doing it because it’s too big to tackle at once, and you need to break it down into smaller steps.
• Or maybe it becomes clear that someone else should be doing it, and you just need to delegate it. Your todo becomes a new one about reaching out to the right person.

This conscious choice is a form of healthy friction in your planning tool. Use it.

You’ll find that it’s one way to eventually force yourself to make the choices you needed to make up front. Even if you didn’t know enough to make them at first.

So start fresh everyday, to live a deliberate life.