I Ditched My Complicated To-Do List for a Single Text File. Here's What Happened.

For years, my digital life was a tangled mess of productivity apps. I tried them all—the ones with Kanban boards, the ones with intricate tagging systems, the ones that promised to gamify my life. Each one started with a burst of optimism but ended in the same place: a cluttered, overwhelming list of half-finished projects and nagging notifications. My system to get organized was, ironically, the single biggest source of my anxiety. I was spending more time managing my to-do list than actually doing the tasks on it.

The breaking point and the .txt file experiment

The turning point came on a Tuesday morning. I opened my feature-rich task manager and was greeted with 17 overdue tasks, three project dashboards, and a reminder to categorize a new inbox item. I just shut my laptop. I couldn\'t face it. In that moment of frustration, I did something incredibly simple. I opened a plain text editor and typed `today.txt`. That was it. No login, no sync settings, no tutorial. Just a blinking cursor on a blank page.

Honestly, I thought it was a ridiculous idea that would last a day. I told myself it was just a temporary reset. But as I started typing out my most critical tasks for the day, something shifted. The friction was gone. The noise was gone. It was just me and my words.

My ridiculously simple text file system explained

My system is almost embarrassingly simple, which I\'ve come to realize is its greatest strength. My `tasks.txt` file, which I keep open on my desktop all day, is divided into three sections:

• -- TODAY -- : No more than 3-5 high-priority items. These are the things that, if completed, will make me feel like I won the day.
• -- THIS WEEK -- : A slightly longer list of secondary tasks or things I need to get to before Friday.
• -- LATER / BRAIN DUMP -- : This is a catch-all for everything else. Random ideas, links to check out, non-urgent tasks. It\'s a place to park things so they don\'t clog up my headspace.

When I complete a task, I don\'t check it off. I delete the entire line. The satisfaction I get from hitting backspace until the task is gone is far greater than any checkmark animation I\'ve ever seen. At the end of the day, I take two minutes to clean up the file, moving any unfinished \'Today\' tasks and planning the next day.

The magic is in the limitations

What I discovered is that the lack of features is the core benefit. There are no reminders to snooze, no projects to assign, no tags to organize. This forces me to be incredibly intentional. If I want to remember something, I have to consciously look at the file. This manual, focused interaction keeps my priorities front and center in a way no automated system ever could.

The unexpected benefits I discovered

Within a week, I felt a profound sense of calm. My \'task anxiety\' had vanished. Because the system was so simple, it never felt like a chore to maintain. I was also getting more done. Without the constant distraction of a complex app, I could focus purely on execution. It taught me that the goal isn\'t to perfectly catalog every possible task you could ever do; it\'s to create a clear, actionable path for what you need to do *right now*. This simple text file became my anchor in a sea of digital complexity. It might not be for everyone, and I still use other tools for large, collaborative projects, but for my personal focus, I\'ve never looked back.