Subscriptionless Productivity
A solution to modern task app complexity.
I’m Hayley Jolliffe—I’m a designer and programmer, and I write about personal knowledge management, philosophy, and productivity in the digital age.
Before you dive in, consider subscribing, checking out my open source projects, or working with my studio, Salvus.
Modern task management is sold to us as a stack: an app for tasks, another for calendars, a third for notes, sometimes a fourth for storage, and it all gets tied together with integrations and automations that take longer to configure than just... doing the work they’re meant to organize. Unless you’re managing an enterprise-sized team (and your enterprise is footing the bill), the complexity just isn’t necessary, or even worth the cost to maintain.
A simpler solution exists, free of dependencies and near-free of cost, that I’ve had hold up over a decade plus of daily use.
The full system requires only two things: index cards and something to write with. A single dollar store trip covers months of use for under $5. I opt for (and recommend) Sharpies, and a full year of heavy, daily usage has never run me over $20. Thicker tools, like Sharpies, are preferable to finer-tip pens. Limited real estate on the card forces prioritization, the system’s core principle.
Each day gets a new card and runs on a fixed task ratio: three work (and/or school), one errand, one for physical wellbeing, and one for a core relationship. Use the card vertically and write on the blank side for best readability and forced prioritization. Without the fixed ratio as the system’s core mechanic, it’s easy to fall into infinite work task territory and end up deprioritizing everything else.
Write your six tasks in the morning before sitting down to work. Work the list in order of relevance. If a task becomes irrelevant—a meeting is canceled, a project wraps early—cross it out and pull in the next appropriate task from the same category. Don’t introduce a seventh task (or beyond) until after the full card is cleared. Maintaining the constraint keeps the system effective, and mitigates the risk of falling into the usual productivity traps, or worse, burnout.
At the end of the day, do a quick mental review: what didn’t get done, and why didn’t it get done? When you look, the answers are usually obvious: you’re waiting on someone else, priorities shifted for a real reason, or you broke the six-task rule and spent the day in infinite-task hell. Breaking the rule happens occasionally, and losing the day to context-switching is bad enough. Forgive yourself, vow to do better tomorrow, and move on.
Then destroy the card. This is the step people resist, and it’s the one that matters most. Carried-over tasks function like a cluttered, unmanaged inbox, and don’t serve you. Even recurring tasks, like daily workouts, are rewritten each day to be crossed out again. Destroying the card regardless of completion status allows you to start each day fresh, improving focus.
The system extends seamlessly into other contexts, particularly grocery lists. A grocery list benefits from the same principles: an index card fits in your pocket, doesn’t have digital dependencies, and is best discarded after use. The last point is particularly important. Showing up at the grocery store with last week’s irrelevant list sucks.
The system even stays cheap and portable at scale. A list or note spanning two cards gets a paperclip. When travelling, I stack cards together with a small binder clip, and wrap the stack with an elastic for tucking in my tools.
Over a decade of using this system has produced one benefit I have yet to replicate with software: finishing the day with an empty list. The reason for it is simple: the software companies need you overwhelmed so you keep paying for their “solution”. If you want a real solution, I encourage you to try out my system for a week, and see if you notice the benefits I do. For the price of a coffee, you’ll stop losing tasks to feature complexity you never wanted, and get more done than you would with the subscription-based alternatives.