Lightweight Task Tracking With Claude
(No App Required)

The problem with task apps

They require more maintenance than they save

I've used most of them. Todoist, Things, Linear, Notion databases, plain Kanban boards. They all have the same failure mode: they require you to keep them updated to stay useful. If you're busy — which is when you most need a task system — you stop updating. The app becomes stale. You stop trusting it. You go back to remembering things in your head.

The other problem: task apps don't know your context. They can show you a list. They can't tell you which item on that list is most important given what else you have going on today, or that the thing in slot 3 is actually blocked by the thing in slot 7, or that you're about to miss a commitment because you're focused on the wrong work. They're lists. Lists are fine. They're not thinking.

Claude can think. The question is what format to give it.

The format

Three states: NOW, NEXT, WAITING

The format is a plain text file — I call mine tasks.md — with three sections. Each item is a single line. The rules are minimal by design: the more structure, the more maintenance overhead.

## NOW
- Final pass on inbox triage blog post (30 min)
- Review PR #14 — Marcus's comment on the auth flow
- Reply to Lisa re: invoice status

## NEXT
- Book 1 chapter 3 outline
- Update homepage with new convo block component
- Draft email sequence for Book 1 launch

## WAITING
- Marcus: contract signature (said EOW) — sent 2026-05-26
- Newsletter platform: DNS propagation — started 2026-05-27
- Lisa: invoice payment — followed up 2026-05-28
      

That's it. No priority numbers. No due dates on individual tasks (important deadlines go in a separate calendar). No tags or projects. Just the three states and one line per item.

WAITING is the most important state. Most task systems don't have it, so commitments you're waiting on from other people either get re-added to your NOW list (noise) or they disappear (dropped balls). The WAITING section captures them without cluttering your active list.

Working with Claude

What to ask Claude to do with it

Paste the task file into Claude and ask specific questions. The three most useful ones:

• Prioritize from context. "Given what's in NOW, what should I do first?" Claude will ask clarifying questions or make reasonable assumptions based on what's visible — deadlines implied by WAITING items, commitments flagged in item names.
• Surface blockers. "Are any NOW items blocked by something I haven't done yet?" Claude will scan WAITING and NEXT for dependencies. It's better at catching these than I am.
• Propose what's next. "It's 2pm, I finished the blog post. What should I do for the next 90 minutes?" Claude gives a concrete answer, not a list of everything that's open.

"The task file isn't the system. The thinking Claude does with it is the system. The file is just the input."

Maintenance

Keep it honest — that's the only rule

Update the file when things change. Move items from NEXT to NOW when you start them. Remove WAITING items when they resolve (or move them to NOW if the resolution created work). Archive completed items to a separate done section at the bottom of the file if you want a record — or just delete them.

The file should never be longer than one screen. If it grows past that, something's wrong — either you're tracking too many things at once, or you're not pruning completed items. Both are fixable.

Next step

Book 1 covers the full daily system

The task file is one piece. Book 1 covers how it integrates with the morning open routine, inbox triage, and the end-of-day session close — so your task list stays accurate without extra effort.

Read Book 1 →