A month with Daily Planner

My theme for 2014 is reclaiming time in my personal life. There's one app that has made all the difference so far.

Daily Planner

Daily Planner is awesome.

There's a lot I'd like to do in my life, and only so much time. Just like we have bills and budgets for our money, we have schedules and to-do lists for our time. Just like the best camera is the one you have with you, the best to-do list is the one you use.

This app doesn't do much, but what it does it does well. Its interface is clean and it has support for replenishing lists you make for tasks that recur daily and weekly (so the task to make my bed is waiting for me in the morning, rather than me having to add it).

To-do lists are important enough for your employer to want you to use them. How much more should you be using a list to keep track of your own life?

Perhaps you fear becoming a robot, a slave to a list? Consider this: we all have 24 hours in a day, and we spend those hours somehow. Planning for what you want in your life and augmenting your discipline with tools to get you there just means that you're filling the one filling out your list rather than someone else (reddit/Facebook/Netflix/Wikipedia binges/your media of choice). In many ways, using a to-do list is less robotic because you're choosing how to behave, rather than riding a wave of dopamine from systems that optimize for diffuse attention. What's more robotic: writing, eating breakfast, practicing the piano, having a clean house, and taking care of those long-procrastinated tasks, or clicking through even the highest-quality list-based articles with animated gifs and hyperbolic headlines? Anyway, that's just my response to the potential "robot" straw-man.

(It just took me about 30 seconds to recall the word "procrastination." I'm choosing to interpret this as an indicator that my productivity has indeed increased.)

Your time is valuable, so here is the short version of the other reasons I love using this app:

• Urgent tasks rob me of time and freedom. Having a list allows me to optimize the completion of tasks I need to get done before they become urgent.
• Having a list lets me take advantage of time that would be otherwise wasted.
• Web browsing is no longer something I do for its own sake, but something I do in the service of working through items on my list.
• Checking things off the list is quite causes me to experience less guilt and more freedom.
• Seeing the things I don't get to reminds me that time is limited. Having a list prioritized keeps me focused on what I most want and helps me stop myself from overcommitting.

So try it for yourself. Install Daily Planner or some equivalent app to your smartphone. Place the app's icon where Facebook's icon used to be (now you have muscle memory working for you rather than against you!). If you hate it, go back in a week. I doubt you'll hate it.

Welcome to the life you meant to live.