Open Tabs

Stories about shared places and ordinary habits

Three sticky notes and a cup of tea

I deleted the to-do app and allowed myself three notes on the edge of the monitor. The tea turned out to be the other half of the system.

By Mara Quint1 min read

A white cup of milky tea on a wooden desk, with a laptop, three sticky notes on a monitor and a small orange fan behind.
Photograph: WPKitchen (CC0-1.0)

The app had two hundred and six tasks in it, and I had stopped opening it because every visit felt like an accusation. So I deleted it and made one rule: three sticky notes on the bottom edge of the monitor, one task each, and nothing new until one comes down.

Three is small enough to read without turning your head. It is also small enough that choosing what goes on a note becomes the real work, which is the part the app had been letting me skip.

The tea is the timer

I make a cup when I start on a note. If it has gone cold before I look up, the task was a good one. If I have finished it and made a second cup, the task was probably two tasks.

A list you can see all of is a list you can actually finish.

Six weeks in, the three notes have been replaced forty-one times. The small fan at the end of the desk is the only thing that has stayed where it was.