The two-list rule.

Every system I’ve tried for organizing my life eventually collapsed into two lists — one for today, one for everything else.

I used to think that was a failure. Now I think it’s the answer.

The graveyard of systems.

I’ve used Getting Things Done, bullet journals, Notion databases with seventeen properties, Trello boards with swim lanes, and a plain text file called TODO.txt that I kept on my desktop for three years. Each one worked for a while. Each one stopped working when the system itself became the work.

The pattern was always the same: I’d spend an afternoon setting it up, feel a surge of control, use it diligently for two weeks, and then slowly stop opening it. Not because I was lazy — because the system asked me to make too many decisions before I could do the thing.

Two lists.

Now I keep two lists. One is called Today and it has three to five things on it. The other is called Everything Else and it has everything else. When I finish Today, I’m done. When I need to pick tomorrow’s Today, I scan Everything Else.

That’s it. That’s the whole system.