Introduction
More than a month has already passed since the beginning of 2026—how has everyone been doing?
This will be a short article, but today I’d like to share some thoughts on daily task management and the mindset around it.
As part of a new experiment and shift in mindset this year, I started setting an upper limit on the number of items (errands, tasks, etc.) I allow myself to put into my daily schedule. Because of the nature of my work, I have a relatively high degree of freedom in deciding my own schedule. However, that very freedom often led me to try to do too many things at once, filling my notes and schedules with an excessive number of items and making my surroundings feel unnecessarily cluttered.
Even when you’re aware of these kinds of problems, actually trying to “fix” them can be difficult—you may not know where to start or what to change. At least, that was the case for me.
But after taking a step back and thinking about it, I realized that the root cause might not be that I simply had “too many things to do,” but rather that I wasn’t controlling the number of things I was trying to deal with in a single day. That realization led me this year to try a different approach: deciding in advance the maximum number of things I’m allowed to do in a day, and then choosing what to include within that limit.
The Problem
I manage my daily tasks using a list called the Daily List in an app called Logseq (I’ve introduced this workflow several times on this blog before). This list is updated every day, and its purpose is to write down—usually the night before—the things I need or want to do the next day, so that I don’t forget them.
Last year, however, my Daily List often included items like the following:
- “I’ll do it if I can, but it’s uncertain whether I actually will.”
- “I probably won’t do this today, but I might do it in the coming days, so I’ll add it now.”
- “Items added on a previous day for similar reasons, which kept being carried over without ever being completed.”
Many of these items were added with the vague intention of “I’ll put it in now so I don’t forget,” or they lingered on the list after being added once, neither completed nor removed. As a result, my list was almost always long and cluttered. A list that was supposed to contain only “what I should do today” ended up burying those truly important tasks under a pile of less relevant ones, creating a negative cycle.
This issue had been bothering me since the first half of last year, but without enough time to think it through properly, I kept carrying around an oversized Daily List day after day.
Rethinking the Approach
During the year-end and New Year holidays, I had some time to reflect on the past year and think about this issue more carefully. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that this problem might be quietly draining my daily productivity, efficiency, and even willpower.
As a concrete way to address this, I decided to introduce a strict limit on the number of items allowed on my daily list. At the moment, I’m still experimenting, so the number isn’t fixed, but for now I’ve set the limit at eight items per day (excluding very small tasks or errands). For example:
# MAIN TASKS (9)
- Work on Project A
- Work on Project B
- Task A
- Task B
- Write a blog article
- Shopping (Costco)
- Post office
- Go to the clinic
- Meet with a friend
No additional items allowed beyond this point. If there’s more I want to add, it gets pushed to another day.
The exact limit may change depending on circumstances, but by deliberately keeping it slightly lower, only truly necessary tasks can remain on the list. This makes it easier to focus on what really matters. I’m still in the trial-and-error phase, but so far it feels promising, and I plan to continue managing my schedule with this rule for a while.
Conclusion
Looking back, I realize that last year I had a lingering sense of comfort in thinking, “It’s better to have more items than fewer.” If higher-priority tasks were finished early, having a list of “things I could do next” already prepared felt like a kind of insurance—something I could immediately turn to without thinking.
In reality, though, having too many options made it harder to decide what I should be doing at any given moment. Important tasks were more likely to get buried and harder to spot. And while this is difficult to quantify, even tasks that were labeled as “low priority” or “only if I have time” still left a subtle sense of failure when they remained unfinished at the end of the day, quietly contributing to a feeling of incompleteness.
Now that I’ve reduced the number of tasks, there are still days when I complete everything and days when I don’t—but overall, the list itself has become much easier to finish. As a result, I often end the day with a clearer, more refreshed feeling than before.
Of course, this approach is based entirely on my own experience, and it may not work for everyone. That said, if you find yourself thinking, “I always have my tasks clearly listed, but I still feel uneasy,” or “I manage my tasks, yet it’s hard to feel a sense of accomplishment,” it might be worth reconsidering not the content of your tasks, but the number of them.
This article may have leaned a bit toward the abstract, so I apologize if any parts were unclear.
Thank you very much for reading :)
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