Task lists have been utilized to keep track of things to do. They are manifested as grocery lists, checklists, etc. They live everywhere such as in notebooks, loose pages, post-its, and even on our digital devices. In The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande popularized and validated some of our assumptions regarding the checklist as a powerful tool to ensure we get things done in a standard way. As I have been building Catalist, I have taken a hard look at what a task list has been, what it is today, and what it can be with regards to productivity at the individual and team level. Thanks to some comprehensive customer development, many insights have emerged and I’m now here to share them.

Task lists are collections of tasks, or items that need to be completed. They vary in terms of complexity based on the resources needed to complete them. This can be boiled down to high-level strategy, mid-level tactics, and low-level operations.

Relationship between 3 levels of tasks

Each level informs the scope of the goal and thus the relative ease. Depending on the stakeholder, this ambiguity can be healthy or harmful. The brilliance of task lists are their flexibility, but their downfall is also in their usage inconsistency. When people write out their tasks, they tend to hover around one of these levels since it falls in line with their level of thinking at that time. Since each individual has a comfort preference when it comes to these levels, it is difficult to force a user to the more basic level, like tactics. Part of this is a comfort not only in scope but also comfort in cognitive load, or how much one can maintain in their mind without relying on separate tools and content.