Why is twenty plenty?
It's trivial to say more is not always better. Of course it's true, but the important question is where to draw the line.
I suggest that twenty items (or up to twenty, since it's a maximum) is plenty for a few related purposes:
- Listing the main sub-tasks when summarising a bigger task or project
- Listing the most important, high-level tasks or goals when considering a specific period of time
- Remembering a list of items (such as one of the above), if it's a list that you use and refer to regularly.
- Fitting on a phone screen without scrolling, making the list a little bit easier to use and to remember.
By enforcing limits you don't merely lose something (the potential for more information, more depth), you gain some things too (ease of use, ease of recall, and perhaps most importantly: being forced to prioritise clearly).
This app includes four kinds of list, each limited to 20 items or fewer:
- An overview of your short-term tasks
- An overview of your long-term tasks
- Sub-items for a short-term task
- Sub-items for a long-term task or project
A few of things to note about these limits:
1 - If you want to add something to your short term list but it's full, that's as good a reason as any to finish one of the existing items.
2 - When you're about to do a sub-section of a long-term project, that sub-section becomes (by definition) a short-term task. This means you can add it to the short-term list, and therefore give it its own sub-items, if needed.
3 - It may seem like an obvious cheat to have a "Miscellanous" item on the list, which can then have subitems for all the things you didn't have room to add at the top level. But another way to see this is as good way to prioritise. If yoou've decided that those "misc." items don't make the main list (yet), then you're less likely to see and think about them, for now.
If you don't like these limits and you want more items, or to be able to drill down to more levels for a single item, then you are welcome to copy and modify this app. With a basic knowledge of javascript it should be fairly simple. The source code is not minified or obfuscated.
Many other features are conceivable: extra data-fields for each item, extra space for each item, making short-term items that link to long term items, searching, shared or group lists, colour codes, etc.
You are welcome to push this as far as you like, but remember that features often come with a cost to the user (e.g. time and complexity) as well as a benefit.
Either way, hope you like it.