I am drawn to the idea of keeping todo lists, but it seems like whenever I start to do it, I begin to feel stressed out or overwhelmed. Not so much by the contents of the list, but by maintaining a list in and of itself. Kind of like an obsessive type of problem. Does anyone else feel this way?
That's not unique, and also, it's often the trap of any productivity tool; doing things in the tool becomes a productivity goal and gets you the feeling of productivity in itself, instead of the tasks it's supposed to help you organise.
You have to find your way of doing things. I mostly stick to GTD, and I've used Apple Reminders, org-mode, and Omnifocus (currently back to Omnifocus) over the years. My workflow does not change so much between these applications, I have to adapt it to technical limitations of the application somehow, but these are the same projects, due dates, tasks, inbox, reviews. Now what stresses me out out and overwhelms me is not having a system in place - now I have to keep all the tasks in mind and to think of them all the time.
I only do them when there is a big gap between finding out about the task and doing it. Mostly I do them on the end of the day friday so when I get back on Monday and have completely forgot what I was working on, I can see a few checklist items for what I was in the middle of.
Creating a 20 point check list is just pointless. Unless maybe it's a list of things you need to verify before pushing something forward and you absolutely can not forget any of them.
