I journeyed to find the best to-do list solution and now madness is upon me

Sometimes the world is a fickle and wanton bastard that throws things at you like a man monk in a library full of diseased rats. To make sense of things, people have made lists. I have done so. Here is my story.

I started with To-Doist, the app that claims to be the world’s favorite task manager. We have already clarified that the world is insane, so this is not as helpful as it could be. As I download the app, I heard a small choir of angels calling from the heavens that “no god shall help you, no beast in the field shall name you, all shall tremble at your horror.” I don’t think the app had anything to do with that, but I deleted the download and continued on.

The second app I tried was Trello. Tried and tested, recommended by the most insufferable and unorganized person I know, Trello was downloaded in an instant. I signed in, creating an account by linking it to some other account. I don’t know which. I just pushed buttons. Then all the “boards” started. I had no idea what to do. What could I do? Make a board for things I could do with my boards? So many possiblities. I could make a board for my kitchen, steps to cook with. I could make a board for my girlfriend, share it with her so she remembered to remind me to take her to Disneyland. Will I? Will she? Let me check my email.

I use Gmail, owned by Google, and paired with Calendar. Google doesn’t know shit about naming things, but it’s catching on as a world class provider in the same thing every other tech company promises: bullshit interfaces that no one will ever use because it was made to make some manager happy before the weekend. What happened to the passion, Google? The love of the game? The desire to give things people will use so a giant company can siphon off all our data and interests and sell them to other companies. I noticed they have Tasks. I figured it would be a featureless void of minimalism that if it actually worked Google would discontinue in six months like they did Reader and Podcasts, so I might as well keep my YouTube Premium because it’ll just show up there anyway.

At this point Trello is a forgotten app. You’ll have to make your peace with that.

My work uses Microsoft, so I thought “How bad can To-Do be?” Then I realized they had just updated Outlook and broke the whole fucking thing. Plus, the “Office 365” landscape has become a tangled hydra beast that interconnects to the point of unproductivity. So many OneNotes linking to Calendar invites from Emails that should have been a Teams call. So no.

In the end, I got a pen and paper and wrote some shit down. When I did them, I crossed it off. At the end of the day, I made a new list of everything not crossed off. Then I burned the old list and fed my plants with the ashes.

Now I’m going to Disneyland.