Why I Ditched Complex GTD Apps for Simple Text Files

I\'ve been on the productivity hamster wheel for over a decade. I’ve downloaded, paid for, and evangelized more GTD (Getting Things Done) apps than I can count. Each one promised a beautiful, frictionless system to finally organize my life. And for a while, they worked. But eventually, every single one of them failed me. Or, more accurately, I failed them. It took me years to realize the problem wasn\'t me—it was the complexity I was chasing.

The siren call of features

When you first discover a new, powerful GTD app, it feels like a revelation. Projects with sub-tasks, nested tags, smart lists, calendar integration, collaboration features... the list is endless. I dove in headfirst. I spent hours, sometimes days, migrating my tasks, setting up intricate tagging systems, and color-coding my projects. I felt incredibly productive, but I wasn\'t actually *doing* anything. I was just organizing my organizer.

The friction of capture

The core of GTD is capturing everything, quickly. But with these apps, capture became a chore. Unlocking my phone, finding the app, waiting for it to load, tapping the \'new task\' button, typing the task, assigning a project, adding tags, setting a due date... by the time I was done, the original spark of the idea was gone. This friction meant that small, important thoughts often never got captured at all.

The never-ending maintenance trap

My beautiful systems quickly became digital junkyards. A weekly review, a cornerstone of GTD, turned into a multi-hour dread-fest of cleaning up old tags, re-organizing projects, and dealing with a backlog of hundreds of vaguely defined tasks. The tool that was supposed to bring me clarity was now the single biggest source of cognitive overhead in my life. I was spending more energy maintaining the system than I was getting from it.

My return to radical simplicity

One day, out of sheer frustration, I opened a simple, plain text file. I titled it `tasks.txt` and wrote down the three most important things I needed to do. No tags. No projects. No due dates. Just a plain list. And for the first time in a long time, I felt a sense of calm. I finished those three things and deleted them. The satisfaction was immense.

Why plain text just works

I’ve been using a simple text-file system for over a year now, and I’ve never been more productive or less stressed. The reason is simple: it gets out of the way. A text file is fast, universal, and future-proof. It opens instantly. It syncs effortlessly via any cloud service. It can be read on any device made in the last 30 years and will likely be readable on any device made in the next 30. There\'s no company that can go out of business, no subscription to manage, and no distracting new features to learn.

Honestly, I thought I needed a complex system to manage a complex life. It turns out I just needed a simple list. By stripping away all the features, I was forced to confront the tasks themselves, not the system I\'d built around them. And that, I\'ve realized, is the real secret to getting things done.