13 ms·

We Still Don’t Get Things Done

425 points by gk1 5y ago

legrande 5y ago
I swear by The Checklist Manifesto[0] However, it's worth noting that just because you didn't do that one thing on your list, it doesn't mean you're a failure in life. A checklist is just a rough guide. You can always delegate or delay the more trickier tasks too. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Checklist_Manifesto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Checklist_Manifesto
- sokoloff 5y ago
  It’s a great book, but seems more aligned to “doing things correctly [preventing errors]” than to “doing things at all [preventing procrastination]”.
  - jvanderbot 5y ago
    There's a subtle point in controlling process to prevent procrastination vs keeping a list of things to do in hopes that helps you ``know what to work on''. Checklists are great at the former.
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  Precisely this. Todo lists are a great way to go through processes, but a terrible way to plan a day's or month's activity.
  - truckerbill 5y ago
    What is a better way you've found?
    - adolph 5y ago
      Time blocking is one. If one doesn’t structure time and context, then todo items can’t get done. Edit: Here’s one implementation by Nir Eyal, author of “Hooked” and Indistractable”: https://www.nirandfar.com/schedule-maker/ https://www.nirandfar.com/schedule-maker/
    - jvanderbot 5y ago
      I mean, I do have a backlog list, and it is prioritized, but my day-to-day follows a process not a todo list. I keep a daily checklist of priority things to fit in: Speak politely, two morning chores, answer all messages from my group, workout, read, tinker with something, no coffee (I'm quitting), no drinks (I'm cutting down), meditate, go outside, update the finances, write in my journal. Each of those is about a 5 minute task or a daily reminder. Read and Tinker often lead to hours-long focus sessions. The key is to show up every day and remove barriers to getting started. If you want to call that a todo list, that's ok, but I call it a process-oriented checklist because of the way I use it. I used to be better about keeping a monthly checklist too, but pandemic has removed most the list.
      - adolph 5y ago
        That sounds semi-similar to the “Seinfeld System,” a method that highlights daily streaks. https://jamesclear.com/stop-procrastinating-seinfeld-strategy https://jamesclear.com/stop-procrastinating-seinfeld-strateg...
- Tempest1981 5y ago
  Adam Savage uses checklists as a motivational tool. Something satisfying about marking things as done. On paper, esp. I could only find this -- with a link to another wired article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20263850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20263850
  - rconti 5y ago
    Yep! I use RememberTheMilk, and while I still have tasks that are years old, I find it generally helpful. I like the confidence of being able to mentally unburden myself of remembering things (even if I usually still do) and sometimes find myself creating tasks just to check them off, because I've done them but hadn't added them to the list-- why not feel good about your accomplishments? The reality is, many tasks, people simply don't want to do!
    - Doches 5y ago
      Skip to the end of that thought, and just keep a list where all you do is write down stuff you've done. Soon you'll have trained your brain to look around for stuff to add to your "done list" (I do this, check out https://donel.ist https://donel.ist for a kill-your-todos-get-stuff-done app I built to help myself do it!)
  - slfnflctd 5y ago
    A simple text file works great for me. Sometimes things get asterisks (or whatever other sophistry I'm hoping in vain will help me actually prioritize according to some sort of 'master plan'), but in the end what's done just gets "//" in front of it and goes in the archive. I feel it does help me combat feelings of low productivity and/or worthlessness at least a little when I can look back on all I've completed. Otherwise it's more of this vague impression of 'not enough' and the resulting general malaise which can all too often become a tar pit.
throw20210730a 5y ago
https://archive.is/5uo8v https://archive.is/5uo8v
datavirtue 5y ago
Classic. Users asking for an obvious and predictable feature they will never use and that will only taint the app. We throw it in because it is obvious and "you gotta have that." Resist.
imsohappy 5y ago
What if some patriotic soul just shoots Fauci? Then are we done?
alpaca128 5y ago
The bit about the Zeigarnik effect was interesting, I didn't know about it but it does make sense and matches my experience. But the reason tasks aren't done frequently usually has nothing to do with how the to-do list is organised, and I'm not sure why the app creators from the beginning of the article were surprised about their checklist not being more effective than any other method. It still doesn't mean it was useless.
kilroy123 5y ago
I'm always curious how others "work." I use the Pomodoro technique myself, where I do a minimum of 8 sessions per workday. I try to do 10, but usually, I'm somewhere in between. I do not count meetings. Every day at work, I show up and do a minimum of 4 straight hours of concentrated and focused work. I often get told things like: "I'm killing it", "I'm a high producer", etc. To me, I feel like I'm cheating the system, and I work too little. What do other people do?
- TheFreim 5y ago
  During school I'd immedietly do all of my assignments. Id spend anywhere from 2 to 6 straight hours getting the entire week of assignments done. By the time I got tired I was done with most of it and had time to do what I wanted. Worked wonders, while everyone else was struggling I was able to get straight A's and work on side projects/video games. Is the "real" world supposed to be different than this experience?
  - jointpdf 5y ago
    I don’t know what the real world is, but my experience as a chronic procrastinator with ADD was the polar opposite of this. I did assignments on the bus, wrote speeches during the period before I’d have to give them, etc. I’m mildly messed up from these habits now, but I did (mostly, with some spectacular failures) get away with it at the time. If something captured my imagination, like certain writing assignments or my programming classes, then I could hyperfocus.
  - 100011_100001 5y ago
    The problem with work is that if you get done, there is always more work to do. So the sprint never ends in a way. In college things are pre-defined and you just have to keep in sync, if you do it early like you or late, the tempo stays the same. With work there is no tempo. However what happens in reality is that for agile teams there is a little bit of a tempo. A Sprint, which is usually two weeks. In my experience there is always more work in a Sprint that can be done. The only solution I have found is working, and then letting things settle. If a story takes 3 days and you get done in 4 hours, what do you do?
black_13 5y ago
These softwares exist to create stats to find out who to punish
jkhdigital 5y ago
I still think David Allen nailed it in Getting Things Done. Not the system necessarily, but he nailed the diagnosis of why we fail to get things done: an inability to be honest with ourselves about (1) the full scope and scale of the commitments we make, and (2) just how little time and attention we have at our disposal in meeting those commitments. Really, it’s the same sort of problem that is described in The Goal and The Phoenix Project, but on a personal level. Calendar timeboxing feels like a solution that actually addresses the real problem, although it is challenging to implement for people who are low in conscientiousness (or have ADHD).
- Lightbody 5y ago
  For what it’s worth, we (Reclaim.ai - I’m quoted in the article), have a lot of ADHD customers who tell us that we help with time blocking on their calendar. In particular, the fact that we do it automatically seems to be the thing they appreciate. Edit: First time I’ve ever been downvoted into negative territory. Clearly I’ve embarrassed myself ;P Is it because of self promotion? I guess… seems weird though I/my company are literally part of the article, I replied to a specific comment around issues with time blocking for ADHD people, and how automation seems to be a solve to the problem highlighted by the parent. shrug
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    fwiw, I’m going to check out your service. The article’s conclusions are philosophical and introspective, but it does give the practical finding that calendar time blocking is a more effective method than simple todo lists. So trying out the latter is an actionable item. Doing a guided meditation session to emphasize with my future self would be another step- wonder if that’s the future of meditation/wellness/productivity lifehack fads.
    - pantulis 5y ago
      In fact the only tool you need for time blocking is Google Calendar --or similar. The rest is just convenience, if any.
  - 5y ago
LVB 5y ago
>Every to-do list is, ultimately, about death. This succinctly captures something I've thought more about as I've gotten older (now 47). This is especially true around the "Someday/Maybe" category in my system. Some items in there are themselves nearly teenagers! And it is sobering how few of these bigger items actually get done or even thought about in a year. But at least I'm checking off dozens of minutia tasks each week :/
- _moof 5y ago
  Saturn has completed slightly more than an entire orbit in the time I’ve been theoretically designing a video game. Someday/maybe indeed!
acituan 5y ago
Good. When we die, we will still have a giant todo list, and that’s OK. That doesn’t mean we haven’t done things, it just means the list didn’t capture the entirety of our desires and goals. Maybe the point of writing them down is mostly reflective; to contextualize them as much as possible and do the ones that we find most important by some unconscious heuristic. That means there will always be uncompleted things. Also we have to see when we itemize things to do, we also objectify ourselves as a doer of those things. Which is OK for making things graspable, but ultimately we are not mere doer of things, we are humans in an existential context. Maybe it is a good thing that we left todo items unchecked, maybe that is our protest against being reduced too much, maybe that procrastination is an attempt at gaining our humanity back, maybe that resistive Netflix binge has some unconscious meaning that needs to be honored.
- planet-and-halo 5y ago
  Thanks for writing this, it's so dead on. Becoming adept at mastering your time, attention, and effectiveness is worthwhile, but so often we mistake the trees for the forest and get caught up in turning ourselves into little efficiency machines.
- OJFord 5y ago
  > , it just means the list didn’t capture the entirety of our desires and goals. No it doesn't? It means we died before we captured the entirety of our desires and goals, whether or not they all featured on the list.
moksly 5y ago
The more project management tools I have to work with, the less likely I am to work for or with a company. I have a somewhat similar stance on software architecture. Sure, I’m TOGAF certified but if you actually expect me to work with notation correct Archimare/UML/whatever and not just draw boxes on a napkin you’re either insane or sell a product with no competition. This is anecdotal of course, but after 30 years of working with hundreds of companies to supply our municipality with software, we have yet to see a correlation between quality and “best practices”. It doesn’t matter if companies do this or that testing and use the full confluence suite or if they just pull spaghetti out of their asses and support is a phone call… the quality is the same over time, hell, often we get more from the spaghetti companies than the “best practice” ones. You might think that it’s a short term thing and that the spaghetti and no testing catches up, but it doesn’t. Maybe because we don’t have to fund those 8 people, that you never really learn the role off but it sure isn’t technical, that sit in on every meeting as opposed to talking directly with the spaghetti slinger and a sales person? I’m not sure, and I’d love to tell people that following this or that “best practice” is the way to go, but that’s just not what our data shows.
- quartesixte 5y ago
  Credit due where credit is due: these project management software companies have done a good job of convincing people they need it. I've taken to using tools that most closely mimic notepad+pen or whiteboard+marker. Increasingly I am finding that a physical whiteboard, markers, and post-its are good enough. And if you need to create backups, the image quality on any smartphone is very, very good these days. The more time spent working on the thing that manages your work, the less you are working!
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    What they do is give middle management something to do. Often questionably necessary, middle management has a hard time doing something when engineers understand the product and upper management has the right balance of setting direction and entrusting decisions to the makers. So they start asking the engineers to do things and get upper management on the train of wanting reporting. Doing that with pen-and-paper engineering and people with context is HARD... so all of these tools exist to make this middle layer of doing work better. And arguably unnecessary people earn a lot of money by convincing themselves and others that they are necessary, so companies get to be organized to have these high overhead tools to support this high overhead style of organization. Now to be honest some level of organization is necessary, and becomes necessary as the enterprise and product grows in complexity, but very very few people work long enough or with a diverse enough set of organizations to be able to see what is necessary and when and what is not. If you hire people and put them in a position and tell them they have to work a certain number of hours they will find or create work to do. Oftentimes this work is not better than doing nothing but the WASP work-ethic and general cultural norms really can't handle the idea that smart, important, useful people can provide the most value sometimes by not doing anything until they are needed.
34qlgkaer 5y ago
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agumonkey 5y ago
Sometimes (regularly actually) i'm fascinated about society as a system, so much fuzz so much ignorance, so much unknowns and noise .. yet it kind works (massive crisis aside).
Doches 5y ago
This is _exactly_ why I stopped keeping TODO lists, and started keeping DONE lists instead. What's a done list? Think of it as an anti-TODO list: your DONE list is where you write down everything that you've, well, done. You know that little dopamine kick you get from filing a neatly-tagged TODO or marking off something that you've finished? A done list is just that, and the only way to use it is to train yourself to stop organising and just...get stuff done. I love it so much I built my own done list app: https://donel.ist https://donel.ist . It's 100% free, and there's even an API to play around with if that's your thing.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bityard 5y ago
  I don't know why you're getting downvoted, but this method is the only thing I've been able to stick with for more than a few days. I have so many things I both have to do and want to do that keeping a written list of them is pointless and demotivating. Only time-sensitive things get written down, and that's just so I don't forget them before it's too late. The beauty of this is that it doesn't need an app, just a notebook or text editor.
- indiv0 5y ago
  I resonate with this, _a lot_. TODO lists don't work for me at all. I can't seem to remember to actually check the damn things for what to do next. The overhead of maintaining them also eats up time. The closest thing I've found that works to motivate and keep me on track is SaveMyTime, which is a time tracking app. I used it in a similar manner to how you describe done lists. I tracked exactly what I've done, every minute of every day. The killer feature of SMT is that it forces you to fill out what you've done prior to unlocking your phone screen. Unlike TODO lists, I have no problem checking my phone frequently :) This meant that I always had a log of where my time was going, what areas of my life needed more attention, where I was spending my time when procrastinating, etc. The very action of seeing that "What did you do in the last 15 minutes?" reminder helps kick my brain into "That's a good question, what should I be doing now?" mode. Unfortunately I've since switched to iOS so SMT isn't an option anymore. I can't seem to find a similar app. Most of the existing time tracking apps expect you to actually set timers, which defeats the purpose. Damn Apple and their OS restrictions mean that no one can make an app that lets you show a screen like that prior to unlocking either. I've settled for writing my own, private app as a replacement. It shows a widget on the home screen (as in-your-face as you can get on iPhones) with the same features as SMT. "X many minutes since you last logged your time, here is a list of likely things you were working on".
cygned 5y ago
I do mise-en-place (preparation) and use TeuxDeux as my todo list. It’s so super simple but such an effective tool, so limiting it’s not getting in my way. I tried everything else, every tool, every technique - nothing works for me. I can’t even use JIRA at work, I put things in TeuxDeux or on a paper list, otherwise I will forget what I need to do. I always wondered if other people had similar challenges. Maybe I am too simple for tech productivity tools.
jampekka 5y ago
For quite a while I have not used any project management or todo-lists at all. I usually have a project or few that I need to progress and I just keep them in my head. Sometimes I book some appointments with some other people which gives me a deadline to make some progress. For some crucial chores I may do a temporary todo-list of maybe three trivial items. Not sure how optimal this is, but I've managed to stay employed and get most important things done. A plus side is that this has a sort of automatic priorization and pruning: I just forget some of the things or projects or ideas, and probably there's a (negative) correlation between importance and forgetting. Perhaps people are on average a bit too preoccupied with planning and "tasking up" and managing and measuring things to do. I've found its often more trouble than it's worth. Also in anything more complicated the plan usually collapses quite rapidly, and having a strict task-structure etc may well cause people to keep the wrong course for too long.
Invictus0 5y ago
Great read. I feel like task lists are really a coping mechanism we resort to when we are placed in a somewhat natural situation--that is, having an overwhelming load of tasks to complete. Once the tasks are "out of mind" and on the list, then they can be completed sequentially--sort the tasks by priority, and then do them in that order. If to do lists were really about our life goals and dreams, then the Seinfeld method still reigns supreme; that is, do the most important thing you need to do every day, even just a little bit of it, and note how many days in a row you've done it. https://jamesclear.com/stop-procrastinating-seinfeld-strategy https://jamesclear.com/stop-procrastinating-seinfeld-strateg...
- ChildOfChaos 5y ago
  It's a popular technique but apparently Seinfeld did not do this, it was a throw away comment that became pop culture.
charles_f 5y ago
This piece focuses on how organizing tasks doesn't increase much the chance of doing the tasks, and suggests that other techniques than digitalized to-dos yield slightly better returns. One thing I think this is missing is that work is hard and time consuming, and brain juice and time are limited resources. 1) You cant do everything. The more I advance in my career, the more comfortable I become with abandoning things. It is almost the same feeling as deleting dead code. I also realized that there's a better chance that I will do something if I enjoy it (duh) or if it's not menial. Tasks that are completely pointless still have a chance of being done if they are fun to me. Tasks that are neither will likely never be touched unless I might get fired for not doing them. What's depressing is that it takes some courage to admit defeat and cancel tasks, for some reason. Probably the fomo or something like that. But the psychological overhead of maintaining a pile of stuff is so high. Look at most backlogs, featuring pages after pages of valueless features that will never be done and bugs that will never get fixed. Yet when you propose a simple rule that we should just delete or close anything that had been lingering for more than 1y, people look at you like you're crazy 2) work is hard, and procrastination is real: we are cabled to minimize our cognitive expenditure. I think I can do a max of 1 to 2h per day of hard work, maybe a bit more if it's something I really enjoy, and there's probably a weekly cap as well. Doing something hard is not something I look forward to (don't put that on your resume). So when I pick the todo list, and have a choice between "add this fun feature to your pet project" or "define goals for next year", guess which will be done, and which will be postponed every single time.. . I think the only way of doing these harder tasks is by making them easier, less ambiguous, time bound, more fun, i.e lower the entry cost of the task. That's where some of the value of GTD and such methods resides - by defining a mechanism that transform "stuff" into actionable items. But even that is hard. I'm almost 20y in, yet I still struggle to abide to a strict process. Work is hard.
- loufe 5y ago
  I generally agree with your points, but 1 to 2 hours? When I'm off-rotation I still find the time for at least 3-4 hours of intense productive work in the day, and on-rotation I am focused oftentimes for 10+ hours in a day. Perhaps it's different levels of mental engagement but I'm curious why you say, what seems to me to be, such low amounts.
rossdavidh 5y ago
Should be "We Still Don't Get Everything Done". Obvious point, but it is crucial to recognize. Lots of stuff gets done, just not everything you thought would. Which is why TODO lists can be useful (for me, anyway), but don't get any more complicated than just a list (I use a chalkboard for non-work and a txt file for work). 1) I need to not forget to do this thing 2) but I can only do one thing right now 3) put the other things on the list, and start working on the one at the top 4) occasionally, the list gets too long, so delete things that you've decided will not get done after all That's all I expect a todo list to do for me, and that is plenty. The less baroque, the better, and frankly it doesn't merit an "app".
- randycupertino 5y ago
  The plain ole todo list works for me as well, but where I really tend to stall out is on the things I don't really want to do and don't really need to do but probably should do at some point. ie- getting the knives sharpened. Eh, I guess they could go another couple weeks/months but on the other hand the big knife was so dull I almost sliced a divot in my finger the other day so maybe I should prioritize actually getting that done! Same with scanning and digitally filing/archiving a bunch of old family paperwork my mom just snail mailed me. I don't need a better todo list app. I need a personal assistant! :P
- netjiro 5y ago
  Agree. Misaligned expectations. A todo list is an overhead. It is only helpful if it actually helps you remember / plan / coordinate / communicate more than the cost of maintenance. Common misconception / misuse: a todo list is a hard set plan of things that have to get done. For most, this is simply not reality. Reality, for most ppl: it is a wishlist. It is better to have that realisation from the start and avoid the negative psychological effect of unfinished todo items or miscommunication / malcoordination of mistaking it for future reality. One startup I was helping a while back had serious todo-itis, with the common negative effects. To help: I bought shitty post-it stickers with very poor glue. They would fall to the floor in random fashion after a week or two [1]. This created a ridiculous exercise where the founder would update the notes that were still important to new stickys. But he would also start throwing things away. Stuff that was no longer that important. Wishlist. Always work on the most important stuff. Items of lower priority can be allowed to fall off the list. By the time you might get around to them the circumstances have probably changed, rendering the original task irrelevant anyway. 1) occasionally by sabotage
throwaway803453 5y ago
The YC credo is about building something people want and shipping your MVP ASAP. What I see time and time again with teams and people prelaunch is a lack of a catalyst to ship their MVP. I've met many people who have an idea and their MVP is 95% complete. Then things stall and feature creep sets in for three reasons: 1) Your MVP will, by design, have technical debt. No one likes debt. 2) Releasing means a shift from being a dev/engineer to being a marketer and building the company that builds the product. And you do this while also working on your technical debt. If your sales stall, then you are stuck in "should I spend more money on time on marketing" hell. 3) Anyone who can build something people want and create an MVP has numerous alternatives for certain income. So as much as I'd like to ship my MVP next month I procrastinate since I am also a consultant who bills at good hourly rate and I can just do that instead. Good isn't just the enemy of great. Good is also a great hedge against the time waste of building a business that is no fun to operate and isn't profitable which is why many MVPs never ship. Edit: typos, clarity
- moltar 5y ago
  Ugh you just described my life for the past month. 95% there. Keep procrastinating on the ship button press (literally CodePipeline approval).
- pototo666 5y ago
  This！ I launch my MVP last month. I can't agree more with you. 1. Tech debts. The coder inside my just to write better code. And writing better code is satisfying. 2. After launch, I become more of a marketer than an engineer. Being a marketer is less enjoyable than being an engineer. I secretly know this before launch. 3. Alternative for income. Yes, I have another side project, whose users calling for more features. I can't help spending time on that project. Thanks so much for clarifying this. edit: what truly prompt me to launch is the death of my mom, which reminded me I have waited too long to do important things.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
4e530344963049 5y ago
https://trimread.org/articles/45 https://trimread.org/articles/45
ausbah 5y ago
I find a to-do is mostly useful for just tracking all the things that pop into my head
everyone 5y ago
Perhaps being so fixated on productivity is not healthy. The whole concept was really only introduced to society along with mass industrialization. It seems that for most of history in most of the world most humans have spent a lot of their timing just sitting around, hanging out. I'd guess we're designed to do a certain amount of that each day.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I've found that GTD apps, TODOs, and even simple task lists, are rarely effective for me. That does not mean they aren't effective. The Japanese corporation for which I worked, lived by them, and they were very effective. But for me, I seldom need more than a couple of reminders on sticky notes, on my desk.
- regularfry 5y ago
  I think if it was only a couple of reminders, sticky notes would be a general solution. It's when it's double-digits of _stuff_ that you need something more structured.
sesuximo 5y ago
“In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” –General Dwight D. Eisenhower
gexla 5y ago
My app for a summary of things I have done is my time tracker. The time horizon for my to-do list is a week. Further out than a week is probably a scheduled item which is a different thing than a to-do. Everything else is an idea among my notes. My backlog is my notes. It's the place where I go to jot something down and then forget about it until something happens to surface that item again. If that happens, then maybe I'll act on it. Maybe I'll just add to the note and forget about it again. Anything on my to-do list which isn't done a week from being added gets turned into a note, to be forgotten about. Information dense project task flows aren't to-do items and I manage them in a proper PM app rather than a to-do app. I think it's important to be constrained with how you use todos. My list is short and easy to manage. Even being memory and attention challenged, it's easy to get a quick grasp on everything I need to do for the next few days.
throwslackforce 5y ago
If we were actually interested in getting things done, we'd get them done, right? It seems like the core of the problem is people having priorities imposed on them that don't match their own, actual priorities. When people aren't getting things done, they're usually doing other things, their actual priorities, not staring idly into space. (Usually. And maybe staring into space is fine too). If your well-being or the well-being of others is at stake, then you got to do what you got to do, and "get things done". But a lot of this sounds like people feeling guilty about not going the extra mile on things they don't actually care about. EDIT: Wow I guess this struck a nerve. EDIT 2: And I think "people having priorities imposed on them" would also include people imposing priorities on themselves without sufficient self-reflection.
- jdauriemma 5y ago
  Yes! I used to be obsessive about TODOs but never found a solution that worked for more than a year. After the novelty wore off, my lists would grow longer and the satisfaction of clearing them would wane. Then I just stopped. And my productivity grew anyway! If I value the task, it gets done because it stays on my mind. Reminders help because there’s no giant list to maintain or to make me feel guilty or defeated. Without the TODOs, I have been more spontaneous and naturally more selective about where I focus my attention.
neilv 5y ago
> You can blame Zeigarnik again. The mere act of making a to-do list relieves so much itchy stress that it can, paradoxically, reduce the pressure to actually get stuff done. “People feel that when they put all their tasks somewhere, they’ve already done most of the work,” Perchik says. But it’s an illusion. The pile of work is still there. I suspect that this effect can work for you, without working against you. For personal (non-work-project) tasks, I've been using a variation of Todo.txt throughout the day, for both "to-do list" task management, and scheduling appointments and reminders. I suppose this Zeigarnik effect described by the article might be helpful, and not defeated, partly due to the priorities assigned the tasks. Tasks are assigned priorities A-Z. I usually only end up looking at priorities A-C (occasionally D). One effect of this might be that prioritizing a task as D or E gets it off my mind (thanks, Zeigarnik)... but another effect is that I keep being reminded of the A-C tasks on days that I could do them, so they don't feel done (take that, Zeigarnik). (Some notes on my variation on Todo.txt, and a snippet of Emacs Lisp that helps support it, is at: https://www.neilvandyke.org/todotxt/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/todotxt/ )
jdrmar 5y ago
This resonates a lot with me. I've tried so many todo apps, but in the end I always returned to a simple piece of paper. It did bother me that paper is not very flexible, so I'm experimenting with a digital 'paper to-do' version. If you're curious, check it out at https://can.do https://can.do :) Feedback of course most welcome.
miika 5y ago
When I get even little bit excited about something and act on it, then it's easy to get things done. No tools required! Then again, when I'm asked to do something that isn't really my thing or something is off, then I just can fix it with some task manager (!). Sure, even the most exciting project may feel little bit boring at times but.. as long as it's not all the time I let it be. It's not healty to be productive all the time.
polote 5y ago
There is only one way to get things done [1]. It is just DO and stop thinking about it or how to do it. Todo apps will not help you get things done, they will only help you accumulate much more tasks that you can do. I mean how can some people think that software will make them do more ? The app will not do the task for you. Contrary to what the title states, some people get things done. But productivity is the same thing as loosing weight. It is very easy to understand what to do, (eat less/work (real work) more hours). But there a tons of business trying to sell you something to achieve it. If you want to get things done, just do it. I don't know what else I can tell you [1] https://blog.luap.info/the-only-way-to-be-productive.html https://blog.luap.info/the-only-way-to-be-productive.html
- tshaddox 5y ago
  That article seems a bit silly to me. Of course the way to do more things is to do more things. That doesn’t mean “how?” isn’t a reasonable question. For example, it could be helpful to read tips for inventorying how exactly I spend my time, to help me identify areas where I’m spending more time than I had realized. This article reads like “reading about how to get better at weightlifting won’t help you, because the only way to lift a heavy weight is to literally lift a heavy weight.”
  - polote 5y ago
    The problem is that "how?" doesnt have any convincing answer. People who are GTDoners are not more motivated by the things they do than other people. The only difference is they do the work and spend the less time as possible thinking how to work more, how to be faster, ...
sn 5y ago
A todo list is not a plan to get things done. If you're serious about getting more done, tracking how you spend your all your time is worth trying as a starting point. It allows you to identify where your time actually goes and what you need to do to prioritize differently (and if that's even possible.) I try to live a spreadsheet driven life. I have a workbook with a sheet for my todo items with due dates if applicable, a sheet for both prospective and retrospective time tracking, a sheet for things I need to buy, etc. all in one place so I can pull tasks in as part of weekly planning. The week usually doesn't go according to plan but I think I still get more done than if I didn't go through the process. Weekly planning also gives me opportunities to start over fairly frequently if I fall off the wagon.
tvirosi 5y ago
What if apps aren't the solution to getting more will power.
rasengan0 5y ago
Yay! article validated, tried and true practice: pen and paper Welcome to the FPN Nuthouse: https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/ https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/
emodendroket 5y ago
> You can blame Zeigarnik again. The mere act of making a to-do list relieves so much itchy stress that it can, paradoxically, reduce the pressure to actually get stuff done. “People feel that when they put all their tasks somewhere, they’ve already done most of the work,” Perchik says. But it’s an illusion. The pile of work is still there. If it went so long without being done, perhaps it wasn't so important after all, and giving yourself permission to quit thinking about it is just what the doctor ordered.
phs318u 5y ago
My current job title is "Head of T<important techy stuff>". I have to get lots of stuff done. But unless my to-do items are, "play guitar", "play nethack", "go for a walk" or "eat as much spaghetti as you want", chances are I don't _want_ to do those things. I _have_ to do them. I promise, you that a list comprised totally of things that I _want_ to get done - will get done. The things I _have_ to get done? Eh - sometimes they get done, sometimes the can gets kicked down the road, sometimes they get delegated, and sometimes (my favourite) they get cancelled. I have tried countless tools over my decades working, and none have helped me with the motivation issue.
- cdrini 5y ago
  There are loads of things I _want_ to get done that have subtasks that I _have_ to get done. In fact, I'd say all my "have to" to-dos are in service of a want. I _want_ to be healthy and live long, so I _have_ to exercise. I don't want to exercise :P I want feature so-and-so, so I have to implement it. Implementing something is sometimes annoying, but I want it to exist.
AussieWog93 5y ago
One thing that so many of these productivity apps (and "productivity hacking" in general) seem to miss is that simply doing more "productive" things doesn't make you more effective, and can in fact have the opposite effect. Certain tasks that you undertake will have an impact that is 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more than lower-importance tasks, and when the scaling gets that extreme it's a completely valid approximation to bin a "productive" task such as "type polite email response to customer who clearly isn't interested in buying your product" in the "non-productive" category alongside "go for a walk" and "play video games". I've spent the last year optimising one of my businesses by simply avoiding tasks that I neither enjoy nor bring in a significant amount of value and the results have been stellar. We've grown enough to the point where we've hired our first employee, and the amount of hours my wife and I are putting in since a year ago has halved.
stoicjumbotron 5y ago
> If you ask people to accomplish a loony amount of work this week, they’ll go, No way. Can’t be done. But if you tell them they’ll need to do that same bonkers amount in a single week one year from now? They’ll think, OK, sure, I could do that. Really hit home.
galaxyLogic 5y ago
I think the gist of it is that TODO-lists don't get done, but that just fine. They are still useful. The purpose of TODO is not to commit to doing something, it is to create a possible plan for accomplishing something. Whether you ever get to actually doing it, it is good to have a plan, in case you a) need to do it b) realize at the time of doing it that there is a better way of doing it, or that in fact you need to do less, or do some different things.
pontifier 5y ago
I had an idea about To Do lists a few years ago. I realized that one of the biggest problems was the hidden complexity of the tasks, and unexpected roadblocks that I'd encounter. Some tasks involved a lot of unknowns, or things that I would have to figure out as I went. The idea I had was premade To Do lists for various common tasks such as automobile maintenance, planning a trip, organizing an event, etc. Never did much with it.
gpsx 5y ago
What would someone do if their to do list was finished? Presumably a person always has more to do. And presumably people think of doing a lot more than they actually can do. Your reach should always exceed your grasp. (Or, less politely, when all is said and done, there is a lot more is said than done.)
- VladimirGolovin 5y ago
  You never finish a to-do list. They are endless. You will always have stuff to do, and it literally never ends. My solution is to be at peace with the fact that it's endless and I'll never be able to stop and say, "that's it, I've completed my to-do list."
BLKNSLVR 5y ago
Article is about personal productivity moreso than corporate, but I'm going off on the corporate tangent because I think the HN crowd can relate. A personal failing of mine, that I'm working on improving, is progress tracking that's as close to understandable-at-a-glance to management as possible. Historically I've always been focused on progress, moving on to the next thing, keep pressing forward, but this comes at the expense of management understanding when it comes to status updates and awareness around delays. Progress reporting, from a purely technical viewpoint, is a bunch of bullshit that gets in the way of progress, but from a business viability, profitability, and general good-management, it's essential. I have to keep reminding myself of that. How this relates to the article: project task time must be allocated to determining and documenting progress. The best way for this to take up a minimal amount of time is to have a methodology determined up front: give management an expectation of what they'll see, and the technical folks an understanding of where progress milestones are, so they'll know what markers are important to progress reporting. It's got to be collaboratively developed. This, in itself, also takes time. More directly related to the article, continually trying to find "the perfect to do app" is just a distraction. Any app is fine. If you're not getting to your tasks the problem is you and / or your expectations, not the app(s). Been there, still doing that... Apt quote from article regarding personal expectations of productivity: "Present self screws over future self". I've stuck with tiddlywiki / noteself as my Swiss-army-knife note taking and organizational tool. I'm also messing with it for tracking project "threads".
DanielBMarkham 5y ago
A year or two ago I was writing some training material on how to keep your software solutions as simple as possible. (In my mind this is the most critical skill in software development that nobody seems to actually teach) I decided to use project management as an example. It's a known field, it's something most everybody can relate to, it looks like something a lot of coders kick around, and it's commonly way, way overdone. So I started with first principles and went at it. Ended up with a few dozen lines of code and a text file. That's it. That's all you need to manage projects from a single person on up to a large-scale program. I integrated with Trello and Google sheets in order to provide whatever graphics people wanted, but with the same general amount of complexity you could integrate with a bunch of other stuff. I remain convinced that the greatest learning experiences I've had in software development over the last decade or so have been these little experiments where I take a commonly over-engineered solution area and poke at it to see just how much complexity is actually required. Every time I do it, it astounds me at the amount of counter-productivity we coders bring to many of the things we create in order to increase productivity. A humbling experience, to say the least.
- gauchojs 5y ago
  Did you write more about it here or elsewhere?
  - DanielBMarkham 5y ago
    My second book is all about how to code solutions as simply as possible: https://leanpub.com/info-ops2 https://leanpub.com/info-ops2 As for this particular exercise from the book, I think I did a video on YT. It probably isn't around, though. As a tech coach, I've had programming, management, and consulting experience in this kind of work from solo developer up to 150-person programs. So there's a lot to cover in a stand-alone piece, at least three in-depth topics. (For instance, I'm willing to bet a lot of other consultants with similar experience would say this result wasn't possible. This is what made the exercise so worthwhile; our intuition about the complexity required and the actual complexity involved in solving problems is commonly off by at least a couple orders of magnitude.)
BenderV 5y ago
I recently removed my personal todo list. I found that it was usually a way to not think about the different issues/projets I had in mind. Removing the todo list forced me to remember the list, to think about possible solutions or related task I wanted to do. I was really, really productive for few weeks... Unfortunately, I quickly fallback to my old habits of listing todo... Simply because I don't give myself proper time to think about what I want to do.
lbriner 5y ago
The discussion quickly goes into corporate inertia, which I think is a different issue than the article, which is more to do with individual productivity. I find it quite interesting but I am definitely guilty of it. Planning some new idea makes me feel a short-lived sense of achievement that I am using my brain but then I realise my Onedrive is full of things that would be great that I never finished (or even started properly in some cases). I guess one problem is that the tools, processes and online stimulation/information, makes us think that we can be productive without hard work, long hours and risk-taking. Even the highest achievers (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, whoever) didn't get there by tools, processes and planning. They took hard decisions and made mistakes. The real question is which of our dreams or ideas is worth sacrificing our spare time to pursue? Which would make the world better? Which others would be better consigned to the bin of "some-else could probably do this better than me" or "If I did this, would I even care on my death bed?"
rerbrerb 5y ago
“Every to-do list is a midlife crisis of unfulfilled promise.” While reading, “Wow, a thoughtful piece on to do list software,” after finishing and noticing the byline, “Oh! Clive Thompson! That dude always makes sense.”
revskill 5y ago
Because it's a people problem. When i work with a good engineer who wants to get things done like me, we could easily solve all problems and get things done.
w1nter 5y ago
I think this article was very good. It captured the same though process I went through: from trying different apps, to trying to build my own, to realizing it’s all about human condition after all. I do think, however, that software for TODO lists sucks, and should support humans better https://blog.frantic.im/all/todo-apps-are-meant-for-robots/ https://blog.frantic.im/all/todo-apps-are-meant-for-robots/

425 points by gk1 5y ago

I swear by The Checklist Manifesto[0] However, it's worth noting that just because you didn't do that one thing on your list, it doesn't mean you're a failure in life. A checklist is just a rough guide. You can always delegate or delay the more trickier tasks too. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Checklist_Manifesto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Checklist_Manifesto

sokoloff 5y ago
It’s a great book, but seems more aligned to “doing things correctly [preventing errors]” than to “doing things at all [preventing procrastination]”.
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  There's a subtle point in controlling process to prevent procrastination vs keeping a list of things to do in hopes that helps you ``know what to work on''. Checklists are great at the former.
jvanderbot 5y ago
Precisely this. Todo lists are a great way to go through processes, but a terrible way to plan a day's or month's activity.
- truckerbill 5y ago
  What is a better way you've found?
  - adolph 5y ago
    Time blocking is one. If one doesn’t structure time and context, then todo items can’t get done. Edit: Here’s one implementation by Nir Eyal, author of “Hooked” and Indistractable”: https://www.nirandfar.com/schedule-maker/ https://www.nirandfar.com/schedule-maker/
  - jvanderbot 5y ago
    I mean, I do have a backlog list, and it is prioritized, but my day-to-day follows a process not a todo list. I keep a daily checklist of priority things to fit in: Speak politely, two morning chores, answer all messages from my group, workout, read, tinker with something, no coffee (I'm quitting), no drinks (I'm cutting down), meditate, go outside, update the finances, write in my journal. Each of those is about a 5 minute task or a daily reminder. Read and Tinker often lead to hours-long focus sessions. The key is to show up every day and remove barriers to getting started. If you want to call that a todo list, that's ok, but I call it a process-oriented checklist because of the way I use it. I used to be better about keeping a monthly checklist too, but pandemic has removed most the list.
    - adolph 5y ago
      That sounds semi-similar to the “Seinfeld System,” a method that highlights daily streaks. https://jamesclear.com/stop-procrastinating-seinfeld-strategy https://jamesclear.com/stop-procrastinating-seinfeld-strateg...
Tempest1981 5y ago
Adam Savage uses checklists as a motivational tool. Something satisfying about marking things as done. On paper, esp. I could only find this -- with a link to another wired article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20263850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20263850
- rconti 5y ago
  Yep! I use RememberTheMilk, and while I still have tasks that are years old, I find it generally helpful. I like the confidence of being able to mentally unburden myself of remembering things (even if I usually still do) and sometimes find myself creating tasks just to check them off, because I've done them but hadn't added them to the list-- why not feel good about your accomplishments? The reality is, many tasks, people simply don't want to do!
  - Doches 5y ago
    Skip to the end of that thought, and just keep a list where all you do is write down stuff you've done. Soon you'll have trained your brain to look around for stuff to add to your "done list" (I do this, check out https://donel.ist https://donel.ist for a kill-your-todos-get-stuff-done app I built to help myself do it!)
- slfnflctd 5y ago
  A simple text file works great for me. Sometimes things get asterisks (or whatever other sophistry I'm hoping in vain will help me actually prioritize according to some sort of 'master plan'), but in the end what's done just gets "//" in front of it and goes in the archive. I feel it does help me combat feelings of low productivity and/or worthlessness at least a little when I can look back on all I've completed. Otherwise it's more of this vague impression of 'not enough' and the resulting general malaise which can all too often become a tar pit.

throw20210730a 5y ago

https://archive.is/5uo8v https://archive.is/5uo8v

datavirtue 5y ago

Classic. Users asking for an obvious and predictable feature they will never use and that will only taint the app. We throw it in because it is obvious and "you gotta have that." Resist.

imsohappy 5y ago

What if some patriotic soul just shoots Fauci? Then are we done?

alpaca128 5y ago

The bit about the Zeigarnik effect was interesting, I didn't know about it but it does make sense and matches my experience. But the reason tasks aren't done frequently usually has nothing to do with how the to-do list is organised, and I'm not sure why the app creators from the beginning of the article were surprised about their checklist not being more effective than any other method. It still doesn't mean it was useless.

kilroy123 5y ago

I'm always curious how others "work." I use the Pomodoro technique myself, where I do a minimum of 8 sessions per workday. I try to do 10, but usually, I'm somewhere in between. I do not count meetings. Every day at work, I show up and do a minimum of 4 straight hours of concentrated and focused work. I often get told things like: "I'm killing it", "I'm a high producer", etc. To me, I feel like I'm cheating the system, and I work too little. What do other people do?

TheFreim 5y ago
During school I'd immedietly do all of my assignments. Id spend anywhere from 2 to 6 straight hours getting the entire week of assignments done. By the time I got tired I was done with most of it and had time to do what I wanted. Worked wonders, while everyone else was struggling I was able to get straight A's and work on side projects/video games. Is the "real" world supposed to be different than this experience?
- jointpdf 5y ago
  I don’t know what the real world is, but my experience as a chronic procrastinator with ADD was the polar opposite of this. I did assignments on the bus, wrote speeches during the period before I’d have to give them, etc. I’m mildly messed up from these habits now, but I did (mostly, with some spectacular failures) get away with it at the time. If something captured my imagination, like certain writing assignments or my programming classes, then I could hyperfocus.
- 100011_100001 5y ago
  The problem with work is that if you get done, there is always more work to do. So the sprint never ends in a way. In college things are pre-defined and you just have to keep in sync, if you do it early like you or late, the tempo stays the same. With work there is no tempo. However what happens in reality is that for agile teams there is a little bit of a tempo. A Sprint, which is usually two weeks. In my experience there is always more work in a Sprint that can be done. The only solution I have found is working, and then letting things settle. If a story takes 3 days and you get done in 4 hours, what do you do?

black_13 5y ago

These softwares exist to create stats to find out who to punish

jkhdigital 5y ago

I still think David Allen nailed it in Getting Things Done. Not the system necessarily, but he nailed the diagnosis of why we fail to get things done: an inability to be honest with ourselves about (1) the full scope and scale of the commitments we make, and (2) just how little time and attention we have at our disposal in meeting those commitments. Really, it’s the same sort of problem that is described in The Goal and The Phoenix Project, but on a personal level. Calendar timeboxing feels like a solution that actually addresses the real problem, although it is challenging to implement for people who are low in conscientiousness (or have ADHD).

Lightbody 5y ago
For what it’s worth, we (Reclaim.ai - I’m quoted in the article), have a lot of ADHD customers who tell us that we help with time blocking on their calendar. In particular, the fact that we do it automatically seems to be the thing they appreciate. Edit: First time I’ve ever been downvoted into negative territory. Clearly I’ve embarrassed myself ;P Is it because of self promotion? I guess… seems weird though I/my company are literally part of the article, I replied to a specific comment around issues with time blocking for ADHD people, and how automation seems to be a solve to the problem highlighted by the parent. shrug
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  fwiw, I’m going to check out your service. The article’s conclusions are philosophical and introspective, but it does give the practical finding that calendar time blocking is a more effective method than simple todo lists. So trying out the latter is an actionable item. Doing a guided meditation session to emphasize with my future self would be another step- wonder if that’s the future of meditation/wellness/productivity lifehack fads.
  - pantulis 5y ago
    In fact the only tool you need for time blocking is Google Calendar --or similar. The rest is just convenience, if any.
- 5y ago

LVB 5y ago

>Every to-do list is, ultimately, about death. This succinctly captures something I've thought more about as I've gotten older (now 47). This is especially true around the "Someday/Maybe" category in my system. Some items in there are themselves nearly teenagers! And it is sobering how few of these bigger items actually get done or even thought about in a year. But at least I'm checking off dozens of minutia tasks each week :/

_moof 5y ago
Saturn has completed slightly more than an entire orbit in the time I’ve been theoretically designing a video game. Someday/maybe indeed!

acituan 5y ago

Good. When we die, we will still have a giant todo list, and that’s OK. That doesn’t mean we haven’t done things, it just means the list didn’t capture the entirety of our desires and goals. Maybe the point of writing them down is mostly reflective; to contextualize them as much as possible and do the ones that we find most important by some unconscious heuristic. That means there will always be uncompleted things. Also we have to see when we itemize things to do, we also objectify ourselves as a doer of those things. Which is OK for making things graspable, but ultimately we are not mere doer of things, we are humans in an existential context. Maybe it is a good thing that we left todo items unchecked, maybe that is our protest against being reduced too much, maybe that procrastination is an attempt at gaining our humanity back, maybe that resistive Netflix binge has some unconscious meaning that needs to be honored.

planet-and-halo 5y ago
Thanks for writing this, it's so dead on. Becoming adept at mastering your time, attention, and effectiveness is worthwhile, but so often we mistake the trees for the forest and get caught up in turning ourselves into little efficiency machines.
OJFord 5y ago
> , it just means the list didn’t capture the entirety of our desires and goals. No it doesn't? It means we died before we captured the entirety of our desires and goals, whether or not they all featured on the list.

moksly 5y ago

The more project management tools I have to work with, the less likely I am to work for or with a company. I have a somewhat similar stance on software architecture. Sure, I’m TOGAF certified but if you actually expect me to work with notation correct Archimare/UML/whatever and not just draw boxes on a napkin you’re either insane or sell a product with no competition. This is anecdotal of course, but after 30 years of working with hundreds of companies to supply our municipality with software, we have yet to see a correlation between quality and “best practices”. It doesn’t matter if companies do this or that testing and use the full confluence suite or if they just pull spaghetti out of their asses and support is a phone call… the quality is the same over time, hell, often we get more from the spaghetti companies than the “best practice” ones. You might think that it’s a short term thing and that the spaghetti and no testing catches up, but it doesn’t. Maybe because we don’t have to fund those 8 people, that you never really learn the role off but it sure isn’t technical, that sit in on every meeting as opposed to talking directly with the spaghetti slinger and a sales person? I’m not sure, and I’d love to tell people that following this or that “best practice” is the way to go, but that’s just not what our data shows.

quartesixte 5y ago
Credit due where credit is due: these project management software companies have done a good job of convincing people they need it. I've taken to using tools that most closely mimic notepad+pen or whiteboard+marker. Increasingly I am finding that a physical whiteboard, markers, and post-its are good enough. And if you need to create backups, the image quality on any smartphone is very, very good these days. The more time spent working on the thing that manages your work, the less you are working!
- colechristensen 5y ago
  What they do is give middle management something to do. Often questionably necessary, middle management has a hard time doing something when engineers understand the product and upper management has the right balance of setting direction and entrusting decisions to the makers. So they start asking the engineers to do things and get upper management on the train of wanting reporting. Doing that with pen-and-paper engineering and people with context is HARD... so all of these tools exist to make this middle layer of doing work better. And arguably unnecessary people earn a lot of money by convincing themselves and others that they are necessary, so companies get to be organized to have these high overhead tools to support this high overhead style of organization. Now to be honest some level of organization is necessary, and becomes necessary as the enterprise and product grows in complexity, but very very few people work long enough or with a diverse enough set of organizations to be able to see what is necessary and when and what is not. If you hire people and put them in a position and tell them they have to work a certain number of hours they will find or create work to do. Oftentimes this work is not better than doing nothing but the WASP work-ethic and general cultural norms really can't handle the idea that smart, important, useful people can provide the most value sometimes by not doing anything until they are needed.

34qlgkaer 5y ago

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agumonkey 5y ago

Sometimes (regularly actually) i'm fascinated about society as a system, so much fuzz so much ignorance, so much unknowns and noise .. yet it kind works (massive crisis aside).

Doches 5y ago

This is _exactly_ why I stopped keeping TODO lists, and started keeping DONE lists instead. What's a done list? Think of it as an anti-TODO list: your DONE list is where you write down everything that you've, well, done. You know that little dopamine kick you get from filing a neatly-tagged TODO or marking off something that you've finished? A done list is just that, and the only way to use it is to train yourself to stop organising and just...get stuff done. I love it so much I built my own done list app: https://donel.ist https://donel.ist . It's 100% free, and there's even an API to play around with if that's your thing.

deleted 5y ago
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bityard 5y ago
I don't know why you're getting downvoted, but this method is the only thing I've been able to stick with for more than a few days. I have so many things I both have to do and want to do that keeping a written list of them is pointless and demotivating. Only time-sensitive things get written down, and that's just so I don't forget them before it's too late. The beauty of this is that it doesn't need an app, just a notebook or text editor.
indiv0 5y ago
I resonate with this, _a lot_. TODO lists don't work for me at all. I can't seem to remember to actually check the damn things for what to do next. The overhead of maintaining them also eats up time. The closest thing I've found that works to motivate and keep me on track is SaveMyTime, which is a time tracking app. I used it in a similar manner to how you describe done lists. I tracked exactly what I've done, every minute of every day. The killer feature of SMT is that it forces you to fill out what you've done prior to unlocking your phone screen. Unlike TODO lists, I have no problem checking my phone frequently :) This meant that I always had a log of where my time was going, what areas of my life needed more attention, where I was spending my time when procrastinating, etc. The very action of seeing that "What did you do in the last 15 minutes?" reminder helps kick my brain into "That's a good question, what should I be doing now?" mode. Unfortunately I've since switched to iOS so SMT isn't an option anymore. I can't seem to find a similar app. Most of the existing time tracking apps expect you to actually set timers, which defeats the purpose. Damn Apple and their OS restrictions mean that no one can make an app that lets you show a screen like that prior to unlocking either. I've settled for writing my own, private app as a replacement. It shows a widget on the home screen (as in-your-face as you can get on iPhones) with the same features as SMT. "X many minutes since you last logged your time, here is a list of likely things you were working on".

cygned 5y ago

I do mise-en-place (preparation) and use TeuxDeux as my todo list. It’s so super simple but such an effective tool, so limiting it’s not getting in my way. I tried everything else, every tool, every technique - nothing works for me. I can’t even use JIRA at work, I put things in TeuxDeux or on a paper list, otherwise I will forget what I need to do. I always wondered if other people had similar challenges. Maybe I am too simple for tech productivity tools.

jampekka 5y ago

For quite a while I have not used any project management or todo-lists at all. I usually have a project or few that I need to progress and I just keep them in my head. Sometimes I book some appointments with some other people which gives me a deadline to make some progress. For some crucial chores I may do a temporary todo-list of maybe three trivial items. Not sure how optimal this is, but I've managed to stay employed and get most important things done. A plus side is that this has a sort of automatic priorization and pruning: I just forget some of the things or projects or ideas, and probably there's a (negative) correlation between importance and forgetting. Perhaps people are on average a bit too preoccupied with planning and "tasking up" and managing and measuring things to do. I've found its often more trouble than it's worth. Also in anything more complicated the plan usually collapses quite rapidly, and having a strict task-structure etc may well cause people to keep the wrong course for too long.

Invictus0 5y ago

Great read. I feel like task lists are really a coping mechanism we resort to when we are placed in a somewhat natural situation--that is, having an overwhelming load of tasks to complete. Once the tasks are "out of mind" and on the list, then they can be completed sequentially--sort the tasks by priority, and then do them in that order. If to do lists were really about our life goals and dreams, then the Seinfeld method still reigns supreme; that is, do the most important thing you need to do every day, even just a little bit of it, and note how many days in a row you've done it. https://jamesclear.com/stop-procrastinating-seinfeld-strategy https://jamesclear.com/stop-procrastinating-seinfeld-strateg...

ChildOfChaos 5y ago
It's a popular technique but apparently Seinfeld did not do this, it was a throw away comment that became pop culture.

charles_f 5y ago

This piece focuses on how organizing tasks doesn't increase much the chance of doing the tasks, and suggests that other techniques than digitalized to-dos yield slightly better returns. One thing I think this is missing is that work is hard and time consuming, and brain juice and time are limited resources. 1) You cant do everything. The more I advance in my career, the more comfortable I become with abandoning things. It is almost the same feeling as deleting dead code. I also realized that there's a better chance that I will do something if I enjoy it (duh) or if it's not menial. Tasks that are completely pointless still have a chance of being done if they are fun to me. Tasks that are neither will likely never be touched unless I might get fired for not doing them. What's depressing is that it takes some courage to admit defeat and cancel tasks, for some reason. Probably the fomo or something like that. But the psychological overhead of maintaining a pile of stuff is so high. Look at most backlogs, featuring pages after pages of valueless features that will never be done and bugs that will never get fixed. Yet when you propose a simple rule that we should just delete or close anything that had been lingering for more than 1y, people look at you like you're crazy 2) work is hard, and procrastination is real: we are cabled to minimize our cognitive expenditure. I think I can do a max of 1 to 2h per day of hard work, maybe a bit more if it's something I really enjoy, and there's probably a weekly cap as well. Doing something hard is not something I look forward to (don't put that on your resume). So when I pick the todo list, and have a choice between "add this fun feature to your pet project" or "define goals for next year", guess which will be done, and which will be postponed every single time.. . I think the only way of doing these harder tasks is by making them easier, less ambiguous, time bound, more fun, i.e lower the entry cost of the task. That's where some of the value of GTD and such methods resides - by defining a mechanism that transform "stuff" into actionable items. But even that is hard. I'm almost 20y in, yet I still struggle to abide to a strict process. Work is hard.

loufe 5y ago
I generally agree with your points, but 1 to 2 hours? When I'm off-rotation I still find the time for at least 3-4 hours of intense productive work in the day, and on-rotation I am focused oftentimes for 10+ hours in a day. Perhaps it's different levels of mental engagement but I'm curious why you say, what seems to me to be, such low amounts.

rossdavidh 5y ago

Should be "We Still Don't Get Everything Done". Obvious point, but it is crucial to recognize. Lots of stuff gets done, just not everything you thought would. Which is why TODO lists can be useful (for me, anyway), but don't get any more complicated than just a list (I use a chalkboard for non-work and a txt file for work). 1) I need to not forget to do this thing 2) but I can only do one thing right now 3) put the other things on the list, and start working on the one at the top 4) occasionally, the list gets too long, so delete things that you've decided will not get done after all That's all I expect a todo list to do for me, and that is plenty. The less baroque, the better, and frankly it doesn't merit an "app".

randycupertino 5y ago
The plain ole todo list works for me as well, but where I really tend to stall out is on the things I don't really want to do and don't really need to do but probably should do at some point. ie- getting the knives sharpened. Eh, I guess they could go another couple weeks/months but on the other hand the big knife was so dull I almost sliced a divot in my finger the other day so maybe I should prioritize actually getting that done! Same with scanning and digitally filing/archiving a bunch of old family paperwork my mom just snail mailed me. I don't need a better todo list app. I need a personal assistant! :P
netjiro 5y ago
Agree. Misaligned expectations. A todo list is an overhead. It is only helpful if it actually helps you remember / plan / coordinate / communicate more than the cost of maintenance. Common misconception / misuse: a todo list is a hard set plan of things that have to get done. For most, this is simply not reality. Reality, for most ppl: it is a wishlist. It is better to have that realisation from the start and avoid the negative psychological effect of unfinished todo items or miscommunication / malcoordination of mistaking it for future reality. One startup I was helping a while back had serious todo-itis, with the common negative effects. To help: I bought shitty post-it stickers with very poor glue. They would fall to the floor in random fashion after a week or two [1]. This created a ridiculous exercise where the founder would update the notes that were still important to new stickys. But he would also start throwing things away. Stuff that was no longer that important. Wishlist. Always work on the most important stuff. Items of lower priority can be allowed to fall off the list. By the time you might get around to them the circumstances have probably changed, rendering the original task irrelevant anyway. 1) occasionally by sabotage

throwaway803453 5y ago

The YC credo is about building something people want and shipping your MVP ASAP. What I see time and time again with teams and people prelaunch is a lack of a catalyst to ship their MVP. I've met many people who have an idea and their MVP is 95% complete. Then things stall and feature creep sets in for three reasons: 1) Your MVP will, by design, have technical debt. No one likes debt. 2) Releasing means a shift from being a dev/engineer to being a marketer and building the company that builds the product. And you do this while also working on your technical debt. If your sales stall, then you are stuck in "should I spend more money on time on marketing" hell. 3) Anyone who can build something people want and create an MVP has numerous alternatives for certain income. So as much as I'd like to ship my MVP next month I procrastinate since I am also a consultant who bills at good hourly rate and I can just do that instead. Good isn't just the enemy of great. Good is also a great hedge against the time waste of building a business that is no fun to operate and isn't profitable which is why many MVPs never ship. Edit: typos, clarity

moltar 5y ago
Ugh you just described my life for the past month. 95% there. Keep procrastinating on the ship button press (literally CodePipeline approval).
pototo666 5y ago
This！ I launch my MVP last month. I can't agree more with you. 1. Tech debts. The coder inside my just to write better code. And writing better code is satisfying. 2. After launch, I become more of a marketer than an engineer. Being a marketer is less enjoyable than being an engineer. I secretly know this before launch. 3. Alternative for income. Yes, I have another side project, whose users calling for more features. I can't help spending time on that project. Thanks so much for clarifying this. edit: what truly prompt me to launch is the death of my mom, which reminded me I have waited too long to do important things.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

4e530344963049 5y ago

https://trimread.org/articles/45 https://trimread.org/articles/45

ausbah 5y ago

I find a to-do is mostly useful for just tracking all the things that pop into my head

everyone 5y ago

Perhaps being so fixated on productivity is not healthy. The whole concept was really only introduced to society along with mass industrialization. It seems that for most of history in most of the world most humans have spent a lot of their timing just sitting around, hanging out. I'd guess we're designed to do a certain amount of that each day.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I've found that GTD apps, TODOs, and even simple task lists, are rarely effective for me. That does not mean they aren't effective. The Japanese corporation for which I worked, lived by them, and they were very effective. But for me, I seldom need more than a couple of reminders on sticky notes, on my desk.

regularfry 5y ago
I think if it was only a couple of reminders, sticky notes would be a general solution. It's when it's double-digits of _stuff_ that you need something more structured.

sesuximo 5y ago

“In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” –General Dwight D. Eisenhower

gexla 5y ago

My app for a summary of things I have done is my time tracker. The time horizon for my to-do list is a week. Further out than a week is probably a scheduled item which is a different thing than a to-do. Everything else is an idea among my notes. My backlog is my notes. It's the place where I go to jot something down and then forget about it until something happens to surface that item again. If that happens, then maybe I'll act on it. Maybe I'll just add to the note and forget about it again. Anything on my to-do list which isn't done a week from being added gets turned into a note, to be forgotten about. Information dense project task flows aren't to-do items and I manage them in a proper PM app rather than a to-do app. I think it's important to be constrained with how you use todos. My list is short and easy to manage. Even being memory and attention challenged, it's easy to get a quick grasp on everything I need to do for the next few days.

throwslackforce 5y ago

If we were actually interested in getting things done, we'd get them done, right? It seems like the core of the problem is people having priorities imposed on them that don't match their own, actual priorities. When people aren't getting things done, they're usually doing other things, their actual priorities, not staring idly into space. (Usually. And maybe staring into space is fine too). If your well-being or the well-being of others is at stake, then you got to do what you got to do, and "get things done". But a lot of this sounds like people feeling guilty about not going the extra mile on things they don't actually care about. EDIT: Wow I guess this struck a nerve. EDIT 2: And I think "people having priorities imposed on them" would also include people imposing priorities on themselves without sufficient self-reflection.

jdauriemma 5y ago
Yes! I used to be obsessive about TODOs but never found a solution that worked for more than a year. After the novelty wore off, my lists would grow longer and the satisfaction of clearing them would wane. Then I just stopped. And my productivity grew anyway! If I value the task, it gets done because it stays on my mind. Reminders help because there’s no giant list to maintain or to make me feel guilty or defeated. Without the TODOs, I have been more spontaneous and naturally more selective about where I focus my attention.

neilv 5y ago

> You can blame Zeigarnik again. The mere act of making a to-do list relieves so much itchy stress that it can, paradoxically, reduce the pressure to actually get stuff done. “People feel that when they put all their tasks somewhere, they’ve already done most of the work,” Perchik says. But it’s an illusion. The pile of work is still there. I suspect that this effect can work for you, without working against you. For personal (non-work-project) tasks, I've been using a variation of Todo.txt throughout the day, for both "to-do list" task management, and scheduling appointments and reminders. I suppose this Zeigarnik effect described by the article might be helpful, and not defeated, partly due to the priorities assigned the tasks. Tasks are assigned priorities A-Z. I usually only end up looking at priorities A-C (occasionally D). One effect of this might be that prioritizing a task as D or E gets it off my mind (thanks, Zeigarnik)... but another effect is that I keep being reminded of the A-C tasks on days that I could do them, so they don't feel done (take that, Zeigarnik). (Some notes on my variation on Todo.txt, and a snippet of Emacs Lisp that helps support it, is at: https://www.neilvandyke.org/todotxt/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/todotxt/ )

jdrmar 5y ago

This resonates a lot with me. I've tried so many todo apps, but in the end I always returned to a simple piece of paper. It did bother me that paper is not very flexible, so I'm experimenting with a digital 'paper to-do' version. If you're curious, check it out at https://can.do https://can.do :) Feedback of course most welcome.

miika 5y ago

When I get even little bit excited about something and act on it, then it's easy to get things done. No tools required! Then again, when I'm asked to do something that isn't really my thing or something is off, then I just can fix it with some task manager (!). Sure, even the most exciting project may feel little bit boring at times but.. as long as it's not all the time I let it be. It's not healty to be productive all the time.

polote 5y ago

There is only one way to get things done [1]. It is just DO and stop thinking about it or how to do it. Todo apps will not help you get things done, they will only help you accumulate much more tasks that you can do. I mean how can some people think that software will make them do more ? The app will not do the task for you. Contrary to what the title states, some people get things done. But productivity is the same thing as loosing weight. It is very easy to understand what to do, (eat less/work (real work) more hours). But there a tons of business trying to sell you something to achieve it. If you want to get things done, just do it. I don't know what else I can tell you [1] https://blog.luap.info/the-only-way-to-be-productive.html https://blog.luap.info/the-only-way-to-be-productive.html

tshaddox 5y ago
That article seems a bit silly to me. Of course the way to do more things is to do more things. That doesn’t mean “how?” isn’t a reasonable question. For example, it could be helpful to read tips for inventorying how exactly I spend my time, to help me identify areas where I’m spending more time than I had realized. This article reads like “reading about how to get better at weightlifting won’t help you, because the only way to lift a heavy weight is to literally lift a heavy weight.”
- polote 5y ago
  The problem is that "how?" doesnt have any convincing answer. People who are GTDoners are not more motivated by the things they do than other people. The only difference is they do the work and spend the less time as possible thinking how to work more, how to be faster, ...

sn 5y ago

A todo list is not a plan to get things done. If you're serious about getting more done, tracking how you spend your all your time is worth trying as a starting point. It allows you to identify where your time actually goes and what you need to do to prioritize differently (and if that's even possible.) I try to live a spreadsheet driven life. I have a workbook with a sheet for my todo items with due dates if applicable, a sheet for both prospective and retrospective time tracking, a sheet for things I need to buy, etc. all in one place so I can pull tasks in as part of weekly planning. The week usually doesn't go according to plan but I think I still get more done than if I didn't go through the process. Weekly planning also gives me opportunities to start over fairly frequently if I fall off the wagon.

tvirosi 5y ago

What if apps aren't the solution to getting more will power.

rasengan0 5y ago

Yay! article validated, tried and true practice: pen and paper Welcome to the FPN Nuthouse: https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/ https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/

emodendroket 5y ago

phs318u 5y ago

My current job title is "Head of T<important techy stuff>". I have to get lots of stuff done. But unless my to-do items are, "play guitar", "play nethack", "go for a walk" or "eat as much spaghetti as you want", chances are I don't _want_ to do those things. I _have_ to do them. I promise, you that a list comprised totally of things that I _want_ to get done - will get done. The things I _have_ to get done? Eh - sometimes they get done, sometimes the can gets kicked down the road, sometimes they get delegated, and sometimes (my favourite) they get cancelled. I have tried countless tools over my decades working, and none have helped me with the motivation issue.

cdrini 5y ago
There are loads of things I _want_ to get done that have subtasks that I _have_ to get done. In fact, I'd say all my "have to" to-dos are in service of a want. I _want_ to be healthy and live long, so I _have_ to exercise. I don't want to exercise :P I want feature so-and-so, so I have to implement it. Implementing something is sometimes annoying, but I want it to exist.

AussieWog93 5y ago

One thing that so many of these productivity apps (and "productivity hacking" in general) seem to miss is that simply doing more "productive" things doesn't make you more effective, and can in fact have the opposite effect. Certain tasks that you undertake will have an impact that is 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more than lower-importance tasks, and when the scaling gets that extreme it's a completely valid approximation to bin a "productive" task such as "type polite email response to customer who clearly isn't interested in buying your product" in the "non-productive" category alongside "go for a walk" and "play video games". I've spent the last year optimising one of my businesses by simply avoiding tasks that I neither enjoy nor bring in a significant amount of value and the results have been stellar. We've grown enough to the point where we've hired our first employee, and the amount of hours my wife and I are putting in since a year ago has halved.

stoicjumbotron 5y ago

> If you ask people to accomplish a loony amount of work this week, they’ll go, No way. Can’t be done. But if you tell them they’ll need to do that same bonkers amount in a single week one year from now? They’ll think, OK, sure, I could do that. Really hit home.

galaxyLogic 5y ago

I think the gist of it is that TODO-lists don't get done, but that just fine. They are still useful. The purpose of TODO is not to commit to doing something, it is to create a possible plan for accomplishing something. Whether you ever get to actually doing it, it is good to have a plan, in case you a) need to do it b) realize at the time of doing it that there is a better way of doing it, or that in fact you need to do less, or do some different things.

pontifier 5y ago

I had an idea about To Do lists a few years ago. I realized that one of the biggest problems was the hidden complexity of the tasks, and unexpected roadblocks that I'd encounter. Some tasks involved a lot of unknowns, or things that I would have to figure out as I went. The idea I had was premade To Do lists for various common tasks such as automobile maintenance, planning a trip, organizing an event, etc. Never did much with it.

gpsx 5y ago

What would someone do if their to do list was finished? Presumably a person always has more to do. And presumably people think of doing a lot more than they actually can do. Your reach should always exceed your grasp. (Or, less politely, when all is said and done, there is a lot more is said than done.)

VladimirGolovin 5y ago
You never finish a to-do list. They are endless. You will always have stuff to do, and it literally never ends. My solution is to be at peace with the fact that it's endless and I'll never be able to stop and say, "that's it, I've completed my to-do list."

BLKNSLVR 5y ago

Article is about personal productivity moreso than corporate, but I'm going off on the corporate tangent because I think the HN crowd can relate. A personal failing of mine, that I'm working on improving, is progress tracking that's as close to understandable-at-a-glance to management as possible. Historically I've always been focused on progress, moving on to the next thing, keep pressing forward, but this comes at the expense of management understanding when it comes to status updates and awareness around delays. Progress reporting, from a purely technical viewpoint, is a bunch of bullshit that gets in the way of progress, but from a business viability, profitability, and general good-management, it's essential. I have to keep reminding myself of that. How this relates to the article: project task time must be allocated to determining and documenting progress. The best way for this to take up a minimal amount of time is to have a methodology determined up front: give management an expectation of what they'll see, and the technical folks an understanding of where progress milestones are, so they'll know what markers are important to progress reporting. It's got to be collaboratively developed. This, in itself, also takes time. More directly related to the article, continually trying to find "the perfect to do app" is just a distraction. Any app is fine. If you're not getting to your tasks the problem is you and / or your expectations, not the app(s). Been there, still doing that... Apt quote from article regarding personal expectations of productivity: "Present self screws over future self". I've stuck with tiddlywiki / noteself as my Swiss-army-knife note taking and organizational tool. I'm also messing with it for tracking project "threads".

DanielBMarkham 5y ago

A year or two ago I was writing some training material on how to keep your software solutions as simple as possible. (In my mind this is the most critical skill in software development that nobody seems to actually teach) I decided to use project management as an example. It's a known field, it's something most everybody can relate to, it looks like something a lot of coders kick around, and it's commonly way, way overdone. So I started with first principles and went at it. Ended up with a few dozen lines of code and a text file. That's it. That's all you need to manage projects from a single person on up to a large-scale program. I integrated with Trello and Google sheets in order to provide whatever graphics people wanted, but with the same general amount of complexity you could integrate with a bunch of other stuff. I remain convinced that the greatest learning experiences I've had in software development over the last decade or so have been these little experiments where I take a commonly over-engineered solution area and poke at it to see just how much complexity is actually required. Every time I do it, it astounds me at the amount of counter-productivity we coders bring to many of the things we create in order to increase productivity. A humbling experience, to say the least.

gauchojs 5y ago
Did you write more about it here or elsewhere?
- DanielBMarkham 5y ago
  My second book is all about how to code solutions as simply as possible: https://leanpub.com/info-ops2 https://leanpub.com/info-ops2 As for this particular exercise from the book, I think I did a video on YT. It probably isn't around, though. As a tech coach, I've had programming, management, and consulting experience in this kind of work from solo developer up to 150-person programs. So there's a lot to cover in a stand-alone piece, at least three in-depth topics. (For instance, I'm willing to bet a lot of other consultants with similar experience would say this result wasn't possible. This is what made the exercise so worthwhile; our intuition about the complexity required and the actual complexity involved in solving problems is commonly off by at least a couple orders of magnitude.)

BenderV 5y ago

I recently removed my personal todo list. I found that it was usually a way to not think about the different issues/projets I had in mind. Removing the todo list forced me to remember the list, to think about possible solutions or related task I wanted to do. I was really, really productive for few weeks... Unfortunately, I quickly fallback to my old habits of listing todo... Simply because I don't give myself proper time to think about what I want to do.

lbriner 5y ago

The discussion quickly goes into corporate inertia, which I think is a different issue than the article, which is more to do with individual productivity. I find it quite interesting but I am definitely guilty of it. Planning some new idea makes me feel a short-lived sense of achievement that I am using my brain but then I realise my Onedrive is full of things that would be great that I never finished (or even started properly in some cases). I guess one problem is that the tools, processes and online stimulation/information, makes us think that we can be productive without hard work, long hours and risk-taking. Even the highest achievers (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, whoever) didn't get there by tools, processes and planning. They took hard decisions and made mistakes. The real question is which of our dreams or ideas is worth sacrificing our spare time to pursue? Which would make the world better? Which others would be better consigned to the bin of "some-else could probably do this better than me" or "If I did this, would I even care on my death bed?"

rerbrerb 5y ago

“Every to-do list is a midlife crisis of unfulfilled promise.” While reading, “Wow, a thoughtful piece on to do list software,” after finishing and noticing the byline, “Oh! Clive Thompson! That dude always makes sense.”

revskill 5y ago

Because it's a people problem. When i work with a good engineer who wants to get things done like me, we could easily solve all problems and get things done.

w1nter 5y ago

I think this article was very good. It captured the same though process I went through: from trying different apps, to trying to build my own, to realizing it’s all about human condition after all. I do think, however, that software for TODO lists sucks, and should support humans better https://blog.frantic.im/all/todo-apps-are-meant-for-robots/ https://blog.frantic.im/all/todo-apps-are-meant-for-robots/