Have you been down the rabbit hole?

Like David Sparks in his post here, I have swam (even dove!) into what he calls the "wild river" of task management apps.

In retrospect, I have done this for one of a few reasons:

• I thought that a more "minimalist design" might help me finish my tasks
• "Uh oh, the competitior has developed a new feature!"
• How can I automate getting these tasks done?
• Fear of failure
• Fear of success

That last one is a killer.

"Oh no. I have all of my tasks planned, organized, curated...now I have to actually do them?!?". That was the common refrain.

I found my way back to the OmniFocus 4 beta about a year and a half after I was one of the early invitees, and boy am I glad I did. I help test every release of the beta for version 4. I still use the public release of OmniFocus 3 everywhere (Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Watch) as it has the feature where on the Apple Watch you can see the current tag, perspective, or project that is being viewed on the iPhone. That is huge when you just want to run around with the watch on and don't want to have to take the iPhone out of your pocket all of the time.

The 4th version of the venerable app by the Omni Group has received a lot of love and care in the past 20 months, and the TestFlight access to the app seems full at the moment, but the good news is that the Omni Group has committed to shipping the final public version this year.

Back to my original point - no app has it all. Stick with the task manager that, at the end of the day, you look back at and nod knowingly at, for the fact that it held the tasks that you said that you wanted to accomplish.

One tip - try not to load your task manager and calendar with more than 3 events for the day, and 10 tasks.

If you work in a corporate gig that can be hard - trust me, I know. As a self-employed person I can go down that commitment rabbit hole, where if I just schedule a few more tasks for the day, maybe I will make more, see more customers, have more social influence, build my business. But, in my experience, burnout starts to happen real quick when you over-commit.

All of this is to say that you can pick a trusty task management app like OmniFocus, Things, Reminders, Todoist, or whatever...just keep your goals fantastic and your daily expectations realistic of what you can accomplish.