Web workers love task lists. Perhaps it’s our fascination with Getting Things Done, or our tendency to work without direct supervision that necessitates plotting the course of our own day. Whatever the reason, I’ve seldom run across a web worker who didn’t have some system for tracking what had to be done next, and next, and next. Sometimes, it seems, we fall so in love with these systems that tracking and organizing tasks becomes a goal in itself, rather than a means to actually get our real work done.
Twitter developer and blogger Alex Payne recently suggested a radical solution to this sort of task list fetishization – the anti-task list:
I don’t create a list of things to blog about, I create drafts; when I have time to write a blog post, I’ll open up my blog editor. Similarly, I no longer take the time to create a task to download something and assign that task a “web” or “home” context. Instead, I just download that something right now or queue it up in a download manager. Where possible, I create a Hazel rule to take care of filing things away in application-specific queues for me. If I have a frequent task that I don’t have a specific tool for, I find one and make sure that the tool supports some kind of queuing.
The anti-task list represents a different way to think about the GTD notion of task contexts. Rather than maintain a central list of tasks for all of your contexts, you let each context organically manage its own tasks. That way, when you switch contexts – to blogging, say, or file management – your tasks are already there waiting for you.
Anti-task lists are a good example of applying the DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principle outside of software development: the idea that any time you type the same code twice you’re wasting effort. Why enter the details of a task in your task list and then repeat those details again to carry out the task? Just enter them once and be done with it. If you’re a GTD practitioner, one sign that you have tasks that could benefit from this approach is a set of application-specific contexts; if you’re assigning your tasks to contexts such as @InDesign, @PhotoShop, or @VisualStudio, it could well be time to cut out the middleman.
Still, the anti-task list isn’t for everyone. If you’re managing tasks that are primarily performed off your computer, a traditional task list may be the perfect tool for you; as there’s no application involved in executing the task, you’re not duplicating data entry. And in my dream world, I’d have a master task list that could somehow extract and combine the information from application-specific queues, so that I could get an overview of my schedule and commitments while still entering things only once. Operating system developers, are you listening?
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