I understand what the author is trying to say, and I've been in that situation where I've mixed small tasks with short and long term projects. I've tried a number of things over the years, but a todo list created with pencil and paper is the most effective way for me to manage my work. It is not a motivational tool. It's not a project management tool. It's simply a task tracking system with very low overhead. Everyone's different, but todo lists do work for me if the items are scoped properly and prioritized.
I agree. We try many tools in our small team, but the main problem was, that we had to fill in simple steps or small problems and for that were all tools to complicated.
Effect: after a short while nobody use them.
We come back to paper and whiteboard. For own simple tasks we use paper. For team tasks we use a simple whiteboard nearby the coffee machine ;-)
But after a while we had the problem that nobody see what the others have done (end up with too much talking -> waste of time).
We decide an another approach, we didn't write todos, but we write about what we have done. Advert ;-) We create http://teamspir.it to write a log about the daily work.
Effect: Everybody knows what the team member have done and why, because we write our sight of view about the things we have done.
Positive effect was, that we review our work and look what we do right or wrong.
For me it is very motivating to write at the end of the week about all things i have done. It give me a better feeling about how many things are finished. Normally i have a wrong memory about that and i think "Oh god, i did not do anything this week", but this is wrong, when you reflect your work, you see how much you have done.
I do a mix between a pencil and paper todo and a written one. I wrote in OneNote (that enables you to write multicolumns lists), print it, and they add things with the pencil.
I never found a practical software to handle the complexities (whatever they are) of ToDo lists.
Exactly. TODO lists work very well on short term tasks. Daily programming tasks for example, that are put on a TODO list and then completed one by one for example.
