📄 Sticky notes, I love you, but you’re freaking me out
You ever find a rogue sticky note in your bag that says something like “PAY PHONE BILL” or “SEND TAXES” and think, “Oh, cool, I’ve been living on borrowed time”?
Or maybe your to-dos are scattered across half a dozen apps: Notes on your phone, flagged emails, a couple of Trello boards you swore you’d keep up with, and that notebook you left at the coffee shop in May.
Here’s the thing: you don’t need more lists. You need ONE LIST.
The problem isn’t that you’re not trying, it’s that you’ve built a haunted house of tasks. Creaky staircases, doors to nowhere, things jumping out at you at random. No wonder it feels impossible to keep up.
Why centralizing your to-dos matters
When you’ve got a dozen capture points, you don’t actually have a system. You’ve got an anxiety machine.
You waste time remembering where something lives.
You second-guess whether you’ve actually written it down.
You’re always playing catch-up instead of moving forward.
You’re missing important deadlines or deliverables by accident.
One central list means your brain doesn’t have to burn energy remembering 14 different hiding spots. If you can trust your system, you get the satisfaction of checking things off without wondering what you forgot.
How to build your “one list to rule them all”
The tool matters less than the principle: everything goes in one place. Whether that’s Notion, Todoist, ClickUp, or a paper notebook you guard with your life, repeat after me:
ONE SOURCE OF TRUTH.
Here’s how to get there:
Pick your home base.
Notion is my go-to because it lets you connect tasks to projects in a really satisfying way. But if you already love another app (Asana, Todo-ist, whatever) that’s fine. Use it.Make it easy to capture.
If it takes more than five seconds to figure out where to add something, you won’t. Add a widget to your phone, a quick-add button on your desktop, or keep your notebook in arm’s reach.Link tasks to projects.
A long task list with no context is just stress on paper. Make sure every task has some sort of project or category attached so you can flag the more important items and prioritize what you’re working on. Labeling it with a project or category is organizing 101.Set due dates in the future
Not everything needs to happen NOW. Pacing things out and taking a moment to think about a reasonable schedule can help limit what you need to do today, and what you know can wait a minute.Kill the duplicates.
Resist the temptation to keep “just in case” lists in Notes, Slack reminders, or email stars. If it’s a real task, move it to your main list. Everything else? Delete.Do a weekly sweep.
Once a week, check all those stray capture points (emails, sticky notes, text messages) and funnel them into the one list. It keeps the system trustworthy.
Why this feels so much better
The minute you centralize, you cut out 90% of the “Did I forget something?” spiral. You can actually prioritize instead of drowning in fragments.
This isn’t about productivity, it’s about peace of mind. The system can hold the weight for you, so your brain can do the fun stuff: creating, planning, dreaming, and finally resting.
Try it yourself
I built a free Notion template to get you started. It’s a tasks + projects dashboard that gives you a clean place to funnel everything. It’s meant to be a basic starting point that allows you to build out more complex systems for yourself.
Whether you’re just trying to get your life admin organized or are juggling a ton of clients, this template can help reel it all in.
Just click the two-squares DUPLICATE button in the upper-right to copy it into your own Notion workspace.
Give it a shot and let me know what you think!
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