I have been using task managers for at least 15 years and always struggled. It was only this year that purely by accident I came across ‘push’ task management and ‘pull’ task management.
Push is the most used system. Tasks have start dates, due dates and deadlines or a mix of all three. Whenever you open your task manager it pushes the tasks to your attention.
Pull task management is the opposite. Nothing has start, due or deadline dates. They may have dates in the description, but no automated dates to push tasks to you. You open your task list and pull out your tasks for the day.
You may wonder who would use Pull. I would and since I’ve done so I’m less stressed and more productive. The reason for this is that on any given day (I’m a pastor) I may; and often do; receive interruptions that would be classed as emergency. Things like a death, a hospitalisation, a personal crises and so on. My push system gave me my 5 tasks for the day and they now have to be postponed. Tomorrow they reappear with 5 new tasks scheduled for that day. Should another emergency arrive I cannot cope.
My pull system is simple. I use Mark Forsters Final Version Perfected and Ternouth’s project management. These are all on paper. I simple flat list in a moleskine cahier notebook with all my tasks. When I look for tasks I open my notebook and follow Forsters methodology.
My projects are similar. Each one in its own manilla folder, all in a tray and only one project is allowed on my desk. The projects have tasks for the project on a sheet of paper at the front of the project folder. This keeps my cahier fairly light. All I need is to add a task that reads, ‘Work on project x’. Once done it is re-added to the end of the list in my cahier notebook.
I’m adding this here as it has really helped me. My stress is reduced, I’m still getting work done and it being on paper actually really helps in taking with me or passing on to someone else or working when waiting for people or at places.
Feel free to ask any questions.
I may not be the only pull task manager out there!
If I’m understanding you correctly then this this is how GTD works. No soft dates, no artificial prioritisation. Just an index of your tasks there for when you have time to do them. If you have a day when you get no free time, then you ignore your tasks entirely.
That said, we all have occasional things with a hard date. If you need a new passport for holiday and the last possible date to apply is the 1st June, its good to be reminded. So it needs a good calendar game.
Some people add on the use of due dates and reminders because that works for them, but it was never really core to GTD, not least because it was devised on paper.
I use a system which has echoes to your observation.
OmniFocus is my task system when I go looking for tasks to complete. When I’m planning out next week, I go and look in OF. OmniFocus has no notifications switched on. I pull tasks from it.
Due is the app which buzzes on my wrist when there is something I have to do. It pushes tasks at me.
A calendar (for “hard landscape” stuff that absolutely has a date, and must happen on/by that date)
A set of project/“next actions” lists (for stuff that’s not part of your “hard landscape”), optionally broken down into whatever contexts give you visibility when you need it.
A way to resurface things that you need to decide at a defined future data (a “tickler file” is the canonical example)
Some way to categorize stuff that you need to retain, but shouldn’t be in this system (“reference”)
This means that tossing “clean car” on your task list and assigning it a due date of next Monday - because you think you’ll get to it by then, and if not, you’ll just punt it out another week - isn’t really in the spirit of GTD. This is because having tasks with due dates that are pure fiction - and known to be pure fiction when they’re created - isn’t a “trusted system.” And it gets worse when that’s 300 tasks with 300 due dates that you might never even do.
But putting “taxes due” on the calendar for April 14th, because you’ve determined that’s the last day you can get to the post office and get things postmarked properly by the deadline, is totally GTD. That’s a real due date.
The tax thing represents a real agreement (“file taxes on time”) you made with yourself. The “clean car” task doesn’t. It’s likely a “I should probably really do this sometime, so I’ll put it down, and see if this arbitrary deadline motivates me to do something I don’t really want to do” sort of thing.
And that’s what’s really at the heart of GTD. It’s a list of things that you’ve agreed that you’re committing to do. You can re-negotiate those agreements any time you feel like it, but nothing should be on your lists that you’re not committed to doing.
To bring it back to the original theme, I’d say GTD supports both “pull” and “push,” but it’s “pull default,” unless there’s a solid reason for “push.”
This discussion is a great example of the evils of bad data design. Most task management apps give “due date” or “do date” huge affordance because of how prominent these data are in the UI, and how they enable the user to make frictionless bad commitments to made-up dates. In turn, the user learns a bad lesson: tasks (and projects) should have dates.
I learned task management apps before I learned GTD, and it took a really long time to unlearn this bad lesson. But yes, I’m a “pull” person too now, and have been for ~3 years. Way happier as a result.
As a long-time GTDer, this thread is a good reminder of how to guard against “due date” creep.
I recently fell into the trap of using due and defer dates too aggressively, such that my “today” list (or “perspective” in OmniFocus parlance) normally has way too many things on it I can reasonably get done in a day. As of this writing, I have a whopping 27 next actions “due.”
Using the calendar as a means to track the stuff that will blow up if not done on a given date hasn’t resonated with me, as I’ve wanted my task list to be the source of truth for all things, well, task-related. But now I’m rethinking that approach.
I’m conducting my quarterly retreat this week and plan to set up my calendar to reflect my hard landscape, which will include appointments and due tasks.
Kanban has a pull system. You have a task list from a source such as your to-do list. At the end of the day, you look at your list and pull tasks from it to a Kanban board. When tomorrow comes, I start working from the “Do” column.
I’m using OmniFocus as my source. I’ve been writing tasks down on an index card and work from that list.
I’m interested in seeing how OmniFocus implements Kanban but I suspect
It might be something that I described in the opening paragraph.
Ken Case from Omni Group mentioned in a recent Omni blog post that he is drawing inspiration for an OmniFocus Kanban feature from this book.
Yes. One only needs to participate in the OmniFocus forum for a few ages to see the frustrations that grow from folks who routinely set due (and defer) dates on their projects or tasks. At some point, one eventually falls into the constant stress of having a task list where everything due today that is not done today gets pushed to be due tomorrow (and so on).
The hard lesson is that due and defer dates are set by external constraints (tax returns on April 15 in the US is a prime example). Otherwise, working off the Eisenhower matrix (urgent, important) can be a relief, but only if one really appreciates how urgent and important are truly not the same thing. Defaulting to “push” everything to urgent is a sloppy way of hiding a desire to set due dates. As though telling the task management app that you are sincerely interested in doing something by a certain date makes it that much easier to do (here Claude … help me paint that ceiling now that I’ve had you set it as due tomorrow).
In the meantime, curious to me is whether Windows software offers any different challenge or advantage to move away from push-driven toward pull-focused task management. Perhaps Obsidian leveled the field. Or perhaps one or the other approach is just a matter of human nature (… let me ask Claude to set a reminder for a few days from now to come back and research this thought further …).
Alongside this are those who have (willingly or unwillingly) accepted too many actions and are never going to meet those commitments.
I’ve been in jobs where there is simply too much to do, or where there is little control over when things are “due”. In my previous role there was a significant element of supporting customer facing sales activities. Some salespeople would regularly overcommit on dates. It was a thankless task with regular refusal (on my part) of unreasonable dates and constant restatement of SLAs to my internal colleagues. One of the reasons I’m now in a new role.
The hard landscape versus known fiction distinction from webwalrus is the part that clicked for me. I think a lot of the push versus pull confusion actually comes from mixing two different tools into one list: real commitments that have an actual time attached (a flight, a meeting, taxes due April 14th) belong on a calendar, and everything else is really just a pool of things you pull from when you have capacity.
The moment I put a fake due date on something like “clean car” just to nudge myself, I stop trusting my own dates, and then I start ignoring the real ones too. Once I got stricter about only putting genuine deadlines on the calendar and letting the rest sit in a plain pull list, the whole system got a lot calmer, less because of which app I used and more because I stopped lying to myself about what was actually due.
I think many of us do something like this because most dates in task management systems are not anchored in reality.
I will now pull the geeky historical detail. I assumed I could count on a resident academic @ryanjamurphy to cover this but he side stepped.
@Wilson_Ng mentions Pull from Kanban/Personal Kanban. Kanban inherits the idea from Toyota Production System (aka Lean). In TPS we avoid building up inventory between stations in the system because it is form of waste. So an upstream station only produces parts because the downstream system gives them a token (kanban card) that allows them to produce the items. The kanban card turns it into a pull system. (A push system would be one where the upstream team just push parts out.)
FWIW the version of pull that @svsmailus and the rest of us practice is similar to what I coach Scrum teams to do. At the start of a work cycle (Sprint), consider the teams capacity and the queue of work. “Pull” the items that the team has capacity for at high quality, in that time.
I thought I’d found my flow with OmniFocus but eventually I ended up adding actions and not getting anything done. I’d be overwhelmed by my well-put-together lists and never knew where to start so I wasn’t pulling.
Then I transitioned to Reminders, using the push strategy. It worked for a while but now I’m back in the trap where I have too many due items every day.
Decision paralysis is real, so I use Daily reviews to process incoming actions, and in my weekly review I plan out what next week looks like, thus limiting the number of decisions I need to make on any given day. Sure, things come out of left field. But I leave some leeway for that, and use daily reviews to sometimes rework my plans for tomorrow.
The use of the defer, planned, and due dates alongside contexts make a real difference in being able to choose what to work on.
I regularly (about once a year) review how GTD is supposed to work to reset and ensure I’m adhering to the basics.
I sit down most mornings with a clear plan of what I will work on today.
The answer for me is friction. The problem with digital task managers is that they are too easy to add stuff to and so we keep throwing it in. Then we end up with hundreds of tasks. This is where writing on paper helps as it adds friction, so I’ll only add stuff I really need to. I manage my projects in paper files. In each project is a paper list of things to be done for that project. This means I don’t see all tasks for all project in one place. It works for me.
I have recently tried to use Trello as it works well as a pull system. If you must write everything down create a list that is ‘backlog’ and another that is ‘next’. Move items from backlog to next that you need to do each day. Remove anything not done at the end of the day back to ‘backlog’. I also have an ‘inbox’ to capture stuff. This is working well for single tasks. I would not put my projects in there as I would quickly add to much and feel overwhelmed. They stay on paper.
Legit question - could you do everything on your lists?
If you have 40 hours worth of stuff to do in a 24 hour day, that’s untenable. You need to get stuff off your lists.
That’s one of the things most people miss about GTD, especially if they haven’t read the book - your list is a list of stuff that you’re absolutely committed to doing. If that’s not true for something, it shouldn’t be on your list.
What he said. I’m often overwhelmed because I have a todo list that one person cannot do.
My solution is to note those things, delegate where I can, but not make them my todo list. I need to note them and will look at them every so often in case something becomes more important than something else, but recognise not everything will get done and I’m ok with that.
It’s a perspective to find tasks that I’ve not touched in a long time. Do they still matter?
One of my friend’s in the Agile community, suggested that electronic task management tools (like Jira, Asana, …) should fade Product Backlog Items away. If you didn’t notice the item fade out of view then it’s not important.
You don’t necessarily need to be absolutely committed to doing something. So you put it on your Someday/Maybe list. BUT then you have to review this list regularly and remove things which you no longer want/need to do.
One of the aspects of GTD that I’ve struggled to implement is maintaining a robust someday/maybe list. I’ve tried implementing one in:
Obsidian (really just a Markdown file)
OmniFocus (using an inactive tag)
Tinderbox (one note for each someday/maybe project)
None of it has worked for me. If you all have any words of wisdom or an approach I haven’t tried, I’m all ears.
Full disclosure: consistently performing weekly reviews is also a struggle for me, which may be the source of the inability to maintain and regularly review a someday/maybe list.
Yes, important clarification. I was mostly speaking about the task list that you were looking at every day. That is, by definition, a list of things you are 100% committed to doing.
