An old colleague of mine.. and CFO of our company.. used to manage his tasks on a piece of paper. It was always in his folder, and for each task he'd write a note on the paper and then draw a box around it. As he completed each task, he'd scratch out the box.

It was crude and messy and reminded me of high school.

A couple of years ago, I found myself migrating towards something like it. I use large index cards, but.. more or less, do the same thing.

I still have remnants of every to do app on my iPhone. In each app there's abandoned lists of tasks that got recorded and forgotten, or recorded and "re-prioritized", forever.

The nice thing about the card is, if it's mostly scratched out and there are things left on it, you can copy the items to a new, fresh card and then keep going. If the items aren't that important, it's as simple as throwing whole card away. It's satisfying and simple and there's no process-guilt involved.

"Throw card out" is a feature.