When you set your sight on a specific todo app chances are that your teammates or your company is using another application. That's not a big issue as you can copy items to your own system. But soon you manage manually the sychronization.
Sometimes the integrated tools have tasks hierarchies that show relationships between task carried on by different people. Instead of having a full picture of what is in the team or corporate tool, you just get what you put in your personnal app and thus you will lack a global view of who is doing what and how tasks relates to others, except if you switch to the other app. Also, you have to manage communicatiokn related to thoses tasks. You end up with cognitive load because of this permanant synchonization.
A lot of good applications to manage todos are focused on the task management system. If you use those apps to collaborate with others, whatever their performance on this domain, if they lack proper communication channels to tasks they will force you to use third pary apps to communicate. And this is a pain because:
you have to remember where you put things
you need willpower to prevent you from reading new messages unrelated to your work when checking in those apps.
you can't easily add context to your todo description based on other's input
Usually todo app let you manage your tasks. You can move them around, define tags, choose priority, etc. At the endo of the day you will use theses tasks to perform actions and that's where lies the problem. If you refer to your todo app to pick up your next action you will end up switching mode. From the past task execution mode you will switch to strategy mode in order to select the next task to perform. This switch is a cognitive load.
Sometimes you perform a task but are unsure about some aspects. You then depends on your todo app to help you find out the meta goal or vision that relates to your at hand task. It's also a startegy related mode if you don't have the information straight away and it will also impair your ability to optimaly perform.
One of the benefit of having your own todo app is that you can manage the size of your tasks. It allows you for instance to decompose tasks assigned by your manager in your company. This provides you focus and fine grain plan to help you carry out your company task. However a lot of company project management systems do not offer such kind of flexibility.
Sometimes just to be able to start something we need small steps. Without the ability to think small we impair our energy just at the begining.
Have you ever noticed that people seldom miss calendar meetings wheras they can often skip planned tasks? It has to do with tasks lack of thickness. In your calendars, events have some length representing (most often) their duration. They have thickness. Todo lists are just a list of slim actions to be performed. You don't feel the needed workload to perform them. You don't see where they are to be performed. You don't see if they overwhelm you.
The last point is important. When you look at your calendar you will likely see that some days will be painful as everything is full. This sens of too much does not happen consciously with the list. Instead of generating a crave top change the scehdule, your list creates an anxiety feeling.
The todo app we use don't offer this kind of thick view of our tasks. That prevents us from carefully managing breaks and phases of recovery (such as the one we have between two calendar days). It prevents us also from refusing tasks because of the deadline and the thickness of all the other tasked we are commited to.
Management consultant usually advise people to manage their energy and not their time. The calendar can help us do that. Unfortunately, the majority of todo app don't play nicely with calendar. A lot of events happens that derail our day and the next task we do is not the one we planed (something that strangely do not happen with calendar events).
But that's just one side of the problem, the other is our energy.
The focus and energy you have fluctuates during the day. We have cycles and preferences about when to do what. Depending on your chornotype you wake up early or you work later. There is an optimal relationship between what we can do and when we do it. Moreover, we are human and get tired when stretching our effort. Any todo planning we do must include this dimension to prevent us to waste our precious time and energy.
If your task management does not include recovery and breaks, it gives you suboptimal advice.
The last thing that impacts your planned task is time management itself. By nature, 5pm on 2023-05-22 happens once. If you have to do something at that time you get just one chance. Todos are different. Some of them have deadlines but their execution is flexible. The time management systems have used us to think in terms of time. Deadlines are kings and they rules what we do. Most people just prioritize their work based on deadlines as if they have hard constraints. By loosing the freedom to plan our tasks based on our energy we wast valuable energy.
To start a task it must be clearely defined, doable, and not too long. Otherwise it tends to discourage us
To work a longtime on tasks relaed to the same project we need to have a clear view of the vision associated, the goals, something that get us sens of why we're at it.
Both views are necessary to be efficient.
The way todo app help us manage task is by setting deadlines. Some apps allow us to manage priorities as well. But deadlines win always as no application allows to implement Eisenhower priority matrix by effectively kicking out urgent but not important tasks. It's usually up to the user to deal with outcomes
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