How I Ditched To-dos and Use Google Calendar to Manage My Life

I love to-do lists. They help me remember what I need to get done and give me a good dopamine boost when I cross things off them. I’ve tried using all sorts of tools to create to-dos from actual notebook to digital notebook and fancy software such as Trello, To.Do and Clear.

Recently, I’ve given up on all of them.

Those tools do a great job in storing tasks and organizing mind. But there is one big problem: they don’t allow me to set and commit a time to do the tasks.

As a generally optimistic person, I always overestimate how much I can get done. My typical relationship with to-do lists went like this: I thought of tons of things to do for the day, threw them into my list, went through it during the day and arbitrarily picked the one I felt like doing. Shoot for the moon because if you miss you’ll land among the stars right? The problem with that is my important tasks get unprioritized. I kept telling myself I would do them later until those laters turned into unending tomorrows. Because there were no start and end time set in place, I did not commit to the tasks and before I knew it, the day had gone by with many tasks left uncrossed.

The intermittent occurrence of failing the promise I set to myself, weeks after weeks, made me feel shitty about myself. That’s…