Lessons learned after 6 months building a task manager

1. Always create short, actionable tasks. Things that take more than a day can almost always be broken up. Eat healthy < Buy healthy groceries < Buy broccoli, edamame, and blueberries.

2. Being focused on exactly one task at a time throughout the day is what makes people feel productive. It's fine to change the one thing you're focused on, but this needs to be a conscious decision. Otherwise, you're likely to be thinking about 2+ tasks at the same time.

3. The '2-minute rule' (if it takes less than two minutes, do it immediately) is BS. I think the reason this came to be is that archiving or 'snoozing' the task into the future takes too long in current task-managers. Sure, if the whole process of writing down the task, deciding when to work on it, whatever else your current task-managing framework asks you to do...takes more than 1 minute, might as well do the task on the spot.

4. It's good to have a moment of the day when you sit down and plan ahead the tasks you're going to work on.

5. It's also good to throw any non-urgent tasks that come your way into the next "planning" moment described on #4.

I'm happy to discuss these points and what evidence made me conclude each of them :).