“I have 1,000+ tasks on my list. What should I do?”

This week, a course student emailed me. Paraphrasing him, he asked:

I did as you said and I’m capturing every to-do I think of to my task manager. But now I have more than 1,000 items in there. Actually, many of them aren’t even tasks—they’re just random thoughts and notes. It has made my task manager completely useless because it’s so overwhelming to look at.

What should I do?

If you’ve watched some of my task management videos or taken one of my courses, you’ll have heard me say: capture every to-do to your system. Don’t filter too much as you’re capturing. Capture everything and sort it out later.

The reason is that you want your system (whether it’s Things 3, OmniFocus, Todoist, Reminders, or some other app) to be the single source of truth. You don’t want some of your to-do lists to live in your task manager, others to live in your email inbox, yet others to live in an app you’re forced to use at work, and a final list to sit in a paper notebook on your desk. You can’t have a proper overview that way.

So you want to capture to your task manager everything that you’re considering doing. But what if you’re capturing way more than you’re completing? What if you’re capturing 100 (or even more) items a week and not completing half as many? That’s how you end up with over 1,000 tasks in your task manager.

First, you don’t get points for completing to-do lists. Life gets meaning from you doing things you care about. Your to-do list is just a tool to help you make that happen. So don’t think of the to-do list equivalent of “inbox zero” as your goal—the number of tasks left on your list is irrelevant.

Second, try to add only to-dos to your task manager. Don’t add notes; store them in a notes app instead. Don’t add goals; write them down on a goal list. And if something is a thought or idea that you really do want to capture and then flesh out later, see whether you can phrase it in as precise and actionable of a way as possible.

Third, prune your to-do lists. During your weekly review, if you see items that you almost certainly will never get around to, delete those items. Be honest with yourself. Avoid wishful thinking. Deep down, you have a pretty good sense of what you’ll never get around to. Delete those items from your list! What’s the worst that could happen? If those things turn out to be truly important you’ll do them anyway, even if you delete them from your lists for now.

Fourth, give yourself permission not to chase every single thought or idea. Don’t define task management “success” as obsessively capturing everything. Task management (and productivity) success means doing more of what matters to you, better. Executing on what matters to you doesn’t require you to chase every lead. In fact, it requires focus; it requires saying “not now” to many things.

And that brings to me to my last point: there will always be more that you could do than you will do. So when I say, “write down everything you’re considering doing”, know thyself. If you tend to consider way too much, then consider less! Filter yourself more strongly when you’re writing items down. When I say, “don’t filter yourself too filter when capturing”, that’s general advice, meant to help a lot of people. If you’re capturing too much, capture less.

Practice capturing only tasks that you’re pretty sure you’ll (eventually) get around to and this problem solves itself.

Happy “tasking”! 😉