If it’s more convenient, then what you’re doing isn’t wrong. Everyone has different input systems.
Mine is to email myself notes, and to use subject header as tags for later sorting. At some point I will setup an email scraper to automatically flag and parse these into actual todo lists.
But for now an email to myself just keeps me focused, and it just works!
It could just be poor communication between you and him. I was the lead in a project over several teams without any onboarding, and several people to answer to without clear lines of hierarchy. I bent over backwards on evening and weekends for 2 years trying to make everyone happy and thus making no one. Had I better communicated that I was struggling, or at least had the life perspective to understand that what was happening wasn’t completely my fault, I could have defended myself better and communicated better to my bosses that their wonderful plan of bringing several teams together with one in-between guy (me) might require some extra thought.
In retrospect I should have quit, but I was new to the country and had no idea what my rights were.