Before moving on, take ten minutes with the list you made at the end of the introduction, all the places your tasks currently live.

For each place, ask two questions:

1. Which failure modes do you recognize? A fat list you’ve stopped opening? Tasks you’ve stopped capturing (and where do those live now)? Due dates you set just to keep something visible? A planning method you abandoned and blamed yourself for?
2. How do you pick what to work on next? When you need to know what to do, does that system help, or do you have to go digging?

In my experience, most people discover they’re running two or three failure modes at once, and that every single place on their list has the same answer to question two: I do, usually by gut instinct.

That’s your diagnosis. Now let’s build the cure.