Have productivity systems gone too far?

Source: Wikimedia Commons. By Rob and Stephanie Levy.

I love a good productivity system as much as any natural-born Virgo. Give me a new app or task management program and I will pour my life into it to see how it all shakes down. It's fun, it's like organizing and re-organizing your life over and over, and who doesn't like that, right?

The internet probably agrees. If you read the right blogs (coughLifehackercough), you can find a new productivity system every week. How fun!

Unfortunately, I think we have gone too far.

It's not to do list tattoos (although that joke might fade over time). The straw that broke me was Autofocus.

Autofocus is a "system" where you literally just write a list of the things you need to do, and then doing them in whatever order you feel like, crossing them off when you're done.

THAT IS A REGULAR OLD TO DO LIST!

Okay, sure, they've formalized it a bit with rules about how you read the list over in a meditative trance to see what jumps out to you most as the thing you will be most motivated to do, and then you work until your motivation wanes before crossing it out and rewriting at the bottom of the list. Now it's fancy.

No! Enough is enough, guys! Do we really need a website and tutorials for this? Have we become so lost that we can't even think to write down the things we need to do on a piece of paper?

Guys. Let's check ourselves before we wreck ourselves.

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