My absolute favorite task manager is Todoist. I’ve been around the block and used all the major ones — from Remember the Milk to OmniFocus and everything in between. Todoist is the best for me.

But a task manager only tells part of the story — it tells us what we got done.

It doesn’t tell us anything about how we were feeling that day. How many tasks we moved or ignored. How many we checked off just so we’d stop seeing them.

And it shouldn’t. I use Todoist so I know everything I have to do. I don’t use it to dictate my work day.

Instead I use two systems for keeping track of that stuff. One is my weekly planning session (I’ll talk about that in a different article).

The other is my Daily 3 Task Journal.

How to Task Journal

The premise is simple:

1. Pick 3 (and only 3) tasks to perform that day. The idea is that if you get those 3 tasks done, you consider the day successful. They can be as big or as small as you’d like.
2. About halfway through your day, check in with yourself on the progress. Ask how things are going, what you’ve gotten done, and what you’re struggling with. You can be as verbose, or as curt, as you’d like. Just make sure to capture thoughts on how you’re feeling.
3. At the end of the day, assess your work. Did you complete the 3 tasks? Why or why not? What was effective? What distracted?

The idea here is to track not only what you intend to do in a given day, but the events throughout the day that helped or hindered you.

Maybe you didn’t get everything done because you had too many meetings. Or people kept interrupting you. Maybe you bit off more than you could chew (something that happened to me on Friday).

Maybe you just weren’t feeling it.

If you did get everything done, maybe it’s because you had 3 uninterrupted hours to get your crucial work done. Maybe your energy levels were high because you slept great the night before. Or maybe you picked easy tasks because you knew you wouldn’t be able to do anything too deep, as I did last Thursday — the day after I got home from a conference.

What’s the Point of Task Journaling?

If you do it right, you’re getting a handle on how you work — so that you can build a better system that saves you time.

Knowing how productive you are in a day, and what aided or prevented you from getting all of your work done, allows you to structure your days better. Deliberately limiting yourself to 3 tasks per day forces you to identify the 15 most crucial tasks (assuming a 5 day work week).

Then you can move or stack meetings. Block off time for deep work. Say “no” or “it can wait” to the things that aren’t in those 15 tasks.

Daily 3 App

This method is so important to me that I actually used AI to create an iOS app for it. It’s called Daily 3 Task Journal, and it sends me 3 push notifications:

1. 6:00am — What 3 tasks do I need to accomplish today?
2. 12:00pm — How am I progressing?
3. 6:00pm — How did I do?

Importantly, you can only ever add 3 tasks, and they don’t roll over. I also have widgets for the Home Screen, lock screen, and Standby mode. I added Shortcuts support (natch) so I could easily export the entries to my Daily Note in Obsidian.

It’s worked so well for me that I decided to submit it to the App Store and it’s available as a beta on TestFlight.

If you’re not an iPhone user, or you’d prefer not to download an app, I also have a Notion Template. You can get both by joining my mailing list here:

You can also use whatever tool you prefer. The method is the important part. It can serve as the foundation for better work that gives you time and space to do the things that really matter.