Productivity Isn’t About Tools — It’s About Accountability
After years of hopping between to-do apps, I finally realized the truth: productivity has very little to do with the tool you use and everything to do with how you hold yourself accountable.
For years, I convinced myself that the key to productivity was finding the perfect app. Todoist, TickTick, Things, Apple Reminders, Notion, paper planners, bullet journals — I’ve used more systems than I can remember. Once smartphones became part of my daily life, the obsession only grew. Every new app looked like a fresh start. A reset. A way to finally get everything under control.
It took me far too long to understand the obvious: the tool doesn’t matter.
What matters is whether your system helps you stay accountable, gives you a way to check in on what needs to be done, and lets you schedule things ahead of time so you can stop relying on your memory. That’s it. Everything else is decoration.
The Trap of Chasing the “Perfect App”
Productivity apps have a sneaky way of making you feel productive just by setting them up. New labels, new tags, new smart lists, new automations — it all gives the illusion of progress.
But there’s a difference between organizing your life and organizing your apps.
I was spending more time tweaking task managers than completing tasks. Every time something didn’t go perfectly, I assumed the system was the problem. So I switched again. And again. And again.
Eventually, I realized that I was chasing potential instead of execution.
The Core of Any System: Capture + Review + Schedule
After trying nearly everything, I boiled my needs down to two things:
- A quick way to capture tasks the moment they appear.
- A reliable way to schedule what needs to happen and when.
That’s it. Anything more becomes noise.
For capturing tasks quickly, I still use Apple Reminders with Siri. It’s not because it’s the best task manager in the world. It’s because it’s the fastest capture method for me. I almost always have my iPhone or iPad within reach, and saying “remind me to…” is frictionless. Speed matters more than features.
Once something is captured, I move it into the real backbone of my system: my Google Calendar.
Why a Calendar Beats Fancy To-Do Apps
I’ve learned that to-do lists alone don’t work for me. They become bottomless pits. Endless stacks of unchecked boxes that get ignored until they haunt me. A digital calendar, on the other hand, forces me to place tasks in time.
That one shift changed everything.
A calendar makes me commit.
It gives every task a home.
It lets me drag things around when life shifts — which is often.
Paper planners lock you into rigid grids. The physical size of the page limits what you can write. You can’t reorder things without scribbling. You can’t easily move an entire day to another time. Digital calendars don’t have those constraints. They flex with you. They adapt. They stay clean.
For someone like me, who deals with low-vision challenges and always tries to find the most accessible workflow possible, this flexibility matters. I can adjust display size, switch themes, remove distractions, and change the view instantly. None of that exists on paper.
When I Finally Stopped Overcomplicating Everything
Looking back, I spent years overbuilding my systems. Every new idea turned into a new structure. More notes. More labels. More layers. I was treating productivity like a hobby instead of a tool.
Eventually, I accepted something simple:
A basic system used consistently beats a complex system used occasionally.
Now, I stick to two things:
- Capture with Siri into Apple Reminders.
- Schedule on Google Calendar across all my devices.
It works because it doesn’t fight me. It doesn’t ask for maintenance. It doesn’t tempt me to rebuild it every few weeks. It just does what it needs to do.
And yes, part of this shift also came from realizing I was using the Notes app way too much — trying to turn it into a task manager, a journal, a reference archive, and a planning system all at once. That’s a conversation for another day, but it’s coming soon.
The Bottom Line
Your productivity system doesn’t need to be pretty.
It doesn’t need to be trendy.
It doesn’t need to impress anyone online.
It only needs to help you show up for your life.
If an app helps you capture tasks quickly and schedule them realistically, then you’re already doing it right — no matter what anyone else uses.
