The best task manager is the one you stop managing. Todoist makes you a professional task manager instead of a producer.
I have nothing against Todoist personally. It is well-designed. It works reliably. The natural language input is genuinely clever. All of those things make it more dangerous, not less — because a well-designed distraction is still a distraction.
The Promise vs The Reality
The promise: capture everything, organize everything, never forget anything. Your second brain for tasks.
The reality: you build a task management system so elaborate that maintaining it becomes your primary activity.
The trap is that Todoist is just good enough to justify the time you sink into it. You label. You filter. You set priorities. You create projects and sections and sub-tasks. You use the karma system to gamify your productivity. And somewhere in there, the actual work becomes what happens between task management sessions.
This is an excerpt. The full teardown — complexity scorecard, data, and the BBM-approved alternative — is at brainbrutalism.com.
Top comments (0)