7 ms·

Todon't

157 points by RossM 14y ago

girlvinyl 14y ago
Interesting. I really love having my todo list and projects in Omnifocus. It helps me finish things and relieves a ton of anxiety. For me, using it actually reduces stress and is pleasant.
moocow01 14y ago
Ive put it at the top of my to-do list to use my brain and gut. I think the problem with to-do lists is when people use them to track literally what they are supposed to do for the day ... you should not need a todo list to guide your day in the larger sense in my opinion. I think where they actually are useful is tracking very small postponed tasks that would otherwise be forgotten - software is filled with these sort of things and probably the reason why devs think to-do lists are so instrumental.
dwc 14y ago
I've tried and failed to use to-do lists off and on over many years. Now I'm using the ultra simple Reminders app that comes with iOS, and it's working for me. The only good thing about the app is the complete lack of features, and that it's with me always. I only put down little things that I'm likely to forget. I give myself permission in advance not to do any of them at any specific time. But when I find myself with spare time and motivation, I always have a couple of things I can pick off the list. It's helped me get a lot more little things out of the way. The big things are another matter, but with fewer little things cluttering my brain…
TeMPOraL 14y ago
I've been suspecting for last few years that reading GTD and productivity blogs in high school might have been the biggest mistake of my life, as I remember that have always drown in overloaded lists of things not yet done since that high school time, and somehow before it I never felt a need for increasing productivity. I feel that todo lists help me get through all those so called errands - stuff I want to get done, but might not particularly enjoy the "doing" part. Otherwise I would forget many of them. But in case of things that really matter for me, writing down TODOs feels silly, as I'd rather actually do the stuff, not write about it. But between work, university and my S.O., I have almost no time to actually do anything from that TODO list, so it up being a list of stuff I could have got done if I had a 40-hour day.
kiba 14y ago
I don't have anything like a todo list. But I do have habits that I followed religiously. I guess you can call it "Invisible Important TODO Items For Today". There are three items that I do every single day: 1. Write 500 words a day, in which I usually spend writing about half baked random things like "fear inoculation", "legoization" or "Conquering Rome with Science". You can see random stuff at http://kibabase.com/articles/notes-and-thoughts http://kibabase.com/articles/notes-and-thoughts 2. Walks 10K steps a day. I did it for an experiment that supposed to last 30 days, now it's in 37th days total. I am trying to build an analysis tool that output pretty JSON of my data, but somehow keep neglecting it. You can read what I have so far here: http://kibabase.com/articles/self-quantification#intervention-1---walking-10k-steps http://kibabase.com/articles/self-quantification#interventio... 3. Measure my step count, my blood pressure, my weight, and my pulse. Well, actually there's a fourth item: read a book everyday. It turns out that I didn't do the million other things that I wanted to do but never do consistently, including coding. Coding should at least be a priority. I can say with a straight face that even writing 500 words a day about random things makes progress. Out of the random things pile in my Notes and Thoughts page, I eventually spun off two essays, one of which is about my self quantification effort in which I am currently doing 10K steps a day, the others is for logging the ideas of the 16+ books I read so far this year. I expect to add more essays to my site over time as essays mature from my primordial soup of random ideas and notes. These activities help keep me healthy and sane. It also makes me feel like a badass, even when I am not.
deleted 14y ago
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SCdF 14y ago
This is an interesting reaction, but I'm not sure it goes deep enough. What is a bug tracking system if not a glorified todo list? What is a shopping list if not a glorified todo: buy X list? When you think up a cool idea for a project or learn about a technology you want to explore next time it fits and add it to your project log / text file / notepad, isn't that basically a todo list? These things are really important: I can't remember every bug my software has, I often forget something I wanted to buy (goddamn avocados, honestly every time they slip my mind), and I can't work on every idea I come up with straight away. I people who have problems with todo lists are using them, I hesitate to say it, incorrectly. They shouldn't run your life, they are just a place to jot things down.
- codinghorror 14y ago
  http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/07/09.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/07/09.html > But I have noticed that in many real-world companies, the desire never to miss any bug report leads to bug bankrupcy, where you wake up one day and discover that there are 3000 open bugs in the database, some of which are so old they may not apply any more, some of which can never be reproduced, and most of which are not even worth fixing because they’re so tiny. When you look closely you realize that months or years of work has gone into preparing those bug reports, and you ask yourself, how could we have 3000 bugs in the database while our product is delightful and customers love it and use it every day? At some point you realize that you’ve put too much work into the bug database and not quite enough work into the product. doesn't really work, though, does it?
  - neilk 14y ago
    How about a radical notion - we only fix the bugs that we got a report on in the last 30 days, or that we've worked on in the past 30 days, and still seem like they are worth the trouble. If fixing the bug is really about adding a new feature, transfer it to a different list. The thing about bugs is that they get reliably re-reported over time anyway, causing you to spend even more time noting the duplicates. And for old bugs, you need to spend even more time reconfirming if they are still relevant. Everybody hates this. Why not exploit the recurrent nature of bug reports, and assume the users will ask us about it again if it matters? I can't think of an instance where we were really glad that we saved some minor bug reports from months and months ago.
scott_meade 14y ago
Jeff sums it up well: "If you can't wake up every day and, using your 100% original equipment God-given organic brain, come up with the three most important things you need to do that day – then you should seriously work on fixing that."
- smegel 14y ago
  So your boss comes up to you one afternoon and asks you to perform a minor, yet important task the next morning, alongside the many, many other tasks and activities, both work and private you have going on. Also, the following morning your car breaks down and you end up getting to work late and flustered. Amid all this chaos, you forget to perform the minor yet important task asked of you, and you don't remember until you see you boss walking towards you that afternoon with a concerned expression on his face. Upon reflection, a smart person would say: A) I really should write these things down somewhere, like maybe on a todo list! B) Nah, she'll be right, I won't forget next time! Hint: the answer is "A"
edanm 14y ago
Sometimes there are things I need to remember. Things like "remember to call this person on Sunday", or "remember to deal with this issue in 3 weeks". Sometimes it's personal (things like "go watch this movie that just came out"), most of the times it's professional (like "take care of that problem you had with the bank"). I don't have a good memory. I need to write these kinds of things down somewhere. It's not (and shouldn't be) that complicated, but it's definitely necessary.
- nowarninglabel 14y ago
  That's what a calendar for. Just think about how more effective it is to schedule a time to see a movie, rather than batting it around your to-do list. What's the point of having a "remember to deal with this issue in 3 weeks" point on your list, when it'd be much better to schedule 30 minutes in 3 weeks where you take care of the issue.
  - edanm 14y ago
    What makes it better in my calendar? Here are a few reasons I prefer this in a list, and not part of my calendar: 1. My calendar tells me specific places to be or people to talk with/meet at specified times. This is important, because I've usually scheduled with these people, so it's not up to me to change it. It's a set time for dealing with something, that has to happen in that specific time. 2. For todo items like "see this movie", usually I don't need 30 minutes. I need 2 minutes to check if the movie is out, decide whether I'll see that movie today or not, and if not, move the task to another day. 3. I don't have a specific I need to deal with that task. I'd rather not postpone it 300 times. 4. I have 10's of these tasks. I really don't want them cluttering up my calendar. All of the above mean my calendar is my go-to place to see actual, important things that I've scheduled with other people. My todo list is the place to see little tasks that I need to do sometime. Perhaps on some specific day, but not in any specific time. These tend to be very different kind of tasks.
  - smegel 14y ago
    > What's the point of having a "remember to deal with this issue in 3 weeks" Because it would be more like "remember to deal with this issue by 3 weeks". What's the point of a calendar entry that reminds you half an hour before a task is due? Calendars are for events, not tracking the status of a task.
outside1234 14y ago
i think i agree with the sentiment of this, but i still find a "bag of ideas" interesting to remind me of things that should be on that short list if my memory fails me.
- codinghorror 14y ago
  I am a fan of research notebooks, for sure, as a general place to put daydreaming and ideas that might be useful one day. But a to do list, to me, is something quite different: it is a contract that This Thing Must Be Done Eventually. I find that this is rarely the case. The things that "must" be done will get done whether they are on any list or not, e.g. What is the most important thing in life? http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/03/on-necessity.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/03/on-necessity.html
blvr 14y ago
I'm glad if going todo-less works for the author but I wouldn't recommend it. I doubt many people have the capacity to remember that meeting you're supposed to have Friday after next at 3:30 or that little bug someone just mentioned over the phone that you'll have to fix at some point when you're back at the office. Like all things, you can go to far with todo lists. Todo today lists have never worked for me. But I'd be lost without a list of appointments and minor/forgettable actions (filed according to the context in which they need to be done).
- codinghorror 14y ago
  I did not say or advocate going calendar-less. The trouble with to-do-ing the minor/forgettable stuff is that, over time, you end up with a big-ass Katamari ball of minor/forgettable that is kind of oppressive. Or you become a slave to getting minor/forgettable things done, out of fear that they will inevitably overwhelm you -- which they will, since there are always a zillion minor, forgettable things you could be doing. Which is worse? I think they're both pretty bad outcomes.
  - blvr 14y ago
    Okay, I'm probably making that mistake because I use Todoist as both calendar and todo list. There is another option as well as the two you list, which is to remove items off your list as you can't/don't want to do them. Since I never have any more than half a dozen items on any of my three calendar/todo lists I never feel particularly oppressed. But I know that if I didn't have those lists there I'd be forgetting stuff all the time and letting people down - and I know because I never used to use a todo list.
dkarl 14y ago
I've largely replaced long-term TODO lists with calendar reminders. That's what my TODOs were anyway, reminders of what I intended to do at some point in the future, and I was always seeing items too late (ahhhhh shit shit shit!) or too early (meh, ignore) so now I just stick each item on my calendar on a date that seems appropriate. Most TODO lists that aren't reminders are just glorified brainstorming. For example, when I make a list of steps for getting something done, I consider it disposable. A task list I generate from scratch tomorrow will probably be more accurate than the one I was working from today. Like design documents, task lists are perennially stale, more harmful than helpful. The one exception to the above two rules is my shopping list, because nothing sucks more than waking up in the morning and not having any coffee.
- codinghorror 14y ago
  I too find the calendar much more useful than the generic to-do list. For one thing, if you can't come up with a specific date you need this done by or on... YAGNI. :)
  - icebraining 14y ago
    But a calendar is just a todo list where the items appear based on a date. Your position is inconsistent, in my opinion.
    - kamaal 14y ago
      Correct, Precisely calendars are a very effective way of maintaining list of lists with deadlines(dates).
- kamaal 14y ago
  You replaced nothing. Now your calender is a meta list carrying your to-do lists with a reminder feature added to it. In other words you just graduated to the next level of to-do list organization. You just don't realize you have.
philsheard 14y ago
Sometimes things pop into your head at the worst time, when you can't do anything about it. However you collect it (todo list app, email, pen and paper), making a reminder is the only way not to fail at life. Real life is too complicated and too important to just forget stuff.
neilk 14y ago
There was an art project I saw a while ago where you got to confess all your undone ideas to a "priest", and you got absolved of the responsibility for doing them. Maybe this is the curse of living in a world where so much more is possible. But OP goes too far when he says that you should rely only on your brain's natural scheduling and short term memory. I mean, without a grocery list, I can't even remember all the ingredients to make a birthday cake. Prioritizing is hard. I don't think there are any simple solutions. But maybe we need some sort of trigger to know when we should throw out undone projects, or cast them into some very far back burner. What would that be?
- B-Con 14y ago
  > But he goes too far when he says that you should rely only on your brain's natural scheduling and short term memory. I mean, without a list, I can't even remember all the ingredients to make a birthday cake if I go to the store and that is my one and only task there. This is mainly what I do with my to-do lists. It's the odd-ball things that need to get done, but aren't pillars for future progress in the day and are out of my normal routine. To pick a random example, dropping off a letter in the mail bin. If I don't do it, I wouldn't know for the rest of the day because I'm never going to think, "Oh, I can't submit my progress report because that letter is still in my backpack!" And I don't do it often, so I'm used to ignoring the mail drop boxes anyway. Aside from my brain either randomly remembering or pulling on a long thread and re-deriving the need to mail a letter, there's no reason it would come to mind. But if I write it down on a centralized list and I repeatedly check said list, hopefully I'll catch it in time. For me, a to-do list is a set of things that need to be done that otherwise don't really fit into the normal flow of life, but still need to be done. And I have a bad memory to boot. I forget things that aren't written down all the time.
3rd3 14y ago
I’m convinced of to-do lists. There is one important rule that often helps: Don't put things on your list that take less than 10 minutes of your time. Do those things right away instead! I write my lists in SublimeText 2 using this plug-in: https://github.com/groenewege/mdTodo https://github.com/groenewege/mdTodo Basically, it provides only one shortcut for marking tasks as completed. That way I don’t lose time by fiddling with the UI of one of those to-do list apps.
btilly 14y ago
Jeff is doing it wrong. A to-do list should be for things that you need to do, not thing that you'd like to do some day. Here is what I do when I need to be particularly organized and productive. I call it a to-done list. (I'm lazy and probably have ADHD, so I never sustain. But whenever I do this it feels great, and it is never hard to start it up again when I get motivated.) I start with a small list of things that I absolutely have to do, in roughly the order that I plan to tackle them. Put that in a plain text file. Write the date below that list. Take the bottom task, break it up into subtasks, recursively, until I've got a task I can work on right now. Do it. Move it down off the list to the date. If I get blocked on that one, add the blocker below the task and pick another task. Continue all day. The next day I start by putting that day's date above the old date, and then continue again. The keys to this are the following: 1. I ONLY include things that I HAVE to do. (Adding all of the, "It would be good to some day" or "I'd like to" leads to depression as described by Jeff.) 2. Items are SPECIFIC and SMALL. The goal is to constantly move them off the list into done. 3. Only include CURRENT stuff. If there is a project that is intended for 3 months from now, it does not go on the list. This list serves 2 purposes. The bit at the top is pretty much a LIFO stack (I add at the bottom, take off from near the bottom) of what I am currently working on. So it is the whole, "I need to do Y in order to do X, be sure I get back to X eventually." And the long list at the bottom is a log of how much I got done, which makes me feel good. If you try this, be aware that a quickly growing top section is proof that you're doing it wrong. Go through the top bit and ruthlessly prune off everything that doesn't need to be there. Yes, I know that some people feel good about taking a list of high level tasks and breaking it up right away to get organized. But really, this makes the list explode, and you won't do as good a job of exploding it out as you will when you are closer to actually doing that item. The rule of thumb is, if you have trouble scrolling through the todo to the already done, the todo is clearly too long.
- 7402 14y ago
  > Jeff is doing it wrong. A to-do list should be for things that you need to do, not thing that you'd like to do some day. Please. I think a certain amount of humility is called for when making claims about how someone ELSE could improve his or her productivity. For example, in my own practice (and contrary to the above), a to-do list has the most value to me precisely for things that I'd like to do someday, and not things I need to do now. This is because I need the list for things that tend to float out of short-term memory. I don't need it for immediate or high-priority tasks, because I tend not to forget those. People are different. It's absolutely a fine thing to say, "This practice improved my productivity. I offer it to you, for your evaluation, in case you find it helpful, too." But even if 95% of workers are more productive with practice X, maybe I am a member of the 5% minority that is more productive with practice Y. It is silly to assume that given various ways of approaching a problem, there is ONE way that will better for 100% of people . Being a professional means I own the responsibility for deciding how to accomplish something. Sometimes a group needs to reach a consensus on how to do something, e.g., pick one source code control system, rather than letting each programmer pick whichever they think makes them individually most productive. But choosing a personal to-do list is personal decison.
jiggy2011 14y ago
I need to make some sort of list or reminder for things that are important but not urgent. I lost a domain name to a squatter before because the "RENEW YOUR DOMAIN NOW" emails ended up in my junk folder.
nostromo 14y ago
All lists for me are transient and limited in scope and usually very effective. For example: "remaining things to do before shipping version x" or "things to get at Costco". I think lists break down when you try to make a single list for your whole life that lasts forever.
smegel 14y ago
I could not disagree more strongly with this post. For me, managing a todo list has been the single greatest boon to my own productivity and self-management I have ever come across. That is not to say I think most or any todo list applications are worth while - I think the vast majority of them are really terrible as they are far too complex or constraining, require too much overhead to do the simple things like creating a task or changing a task status, are too opinionated about how you deal with your todo items (like forcing schedules, reminders or due dates), lack hierarchical structure and lack any kind of free-form input. The best (and only) worthwhile app that I have ever encountered is not even a todo list app - it is simply a Google Docs document that I leave open in my browser on various computers. I use whatever kind of free form structure I want to dump my thoughts and "todo" things that I feel like at the time - and annotate task status with free text tags and tokens that suit me as I go. Various parts of the documents will at times look like todo lists, plans, schedules, itineraries, work-flows, inventories, idea-lists, collections and more - and it is constantly evolving as the state of my work and activities evolve. Important, current stuff goes at the top - for example my first two blocks are titled "Appointments" (dont want to forget those!) and "Today" (what do I absolutely need to do today). Going down the blocks tend to reduce in priority/importance - for example my very last block is called "Learning" which is a list of various things that I would like to learn more of when I have time (not that learning isn't important, but it is a long-term background activity that I don't need to be reviewing every day). If I have some thoughts or plans that I feel are important, but I dont want to focus on them now, I will just dump them in the document and move on to something else. Later I can come back and review that dump, maybe translate it into actual todo item or evolve it into a planned work-flow. This "thought dumping" is a well researched (there is a quite famous book about it I believe) way of self-management and I find it very effective. The most important thing is there is no structure, form or anything other than what I impose on myself - you literally get a blank, empty page and that is it.
dugmartin 14y ago
Maybe we should just write our todo lists on flash paper and light them up at the end of the week. If there is something important on there you would get it done and if not you can see it go bye bye in an instant. No karmic backlog.
- npsimons 14y ago
  I admire this solution for it's full-on tilt towards simplifying life (which may be part of what Atwood was aiming for in the original post). Being a sysadmin and programmer (esp. embedded), though, I'm always of the mind of "just reliably log as much data as possible and sort it out later; disk space is cheap; lost information is not." I would also contend, if you have an issue with writing something down and then archiving it out of your todo list, is that a problem with the system, or you? In any case, yes, logging everything may be too much for some people. Me, I don't like to lose data, even if I ignore it :)
craigvn 14y ago
Only programmers could argue about the rules of using To Do lists.
- petergx 14y ago
  We're like, philosophers of the mundane.
  - npsimons 14y ago
    That's pretty much computer science in a nutshell.
WalterSear 14y ago
I keep my entire life in one very complex 'todo' list wiki. Every day, I refer to it, moving the 'next things to do' to a place of prominence. A couple of times a week, I sit down and spend an hour or so shuffling things around. I have been using this system for almost a decade now. If Jeff hasn't found a way to make todo lists work for him, too bad.
- icebraining 14y ago
  Of course, that means you spend at least thirteen full 8-hour workdays per year just shuffling your todo list.
  - gurkendoktor 14y ago
    Right, but people without a To Do list also spend time thinking about the priority of things and what needs to be done. In fact, that's my personal takeaway from GTD- that the list is there to stop you from thinking about upcoming stuff all day, because it's saved somewhere and can be shuffled at a calm minute.
  - WalterSear 14y ago
    How much time to do you spend thinking about what needs to be done next?
    - icebraining 14y ago
      Negligible. What I need to do is usually either what I had to do yesterday and the day before, or an immediate reaction to some event. What I want to do is best decided in the moment, when all the information (e.g. my mood, availability of other people) is available. The exceptions don't take more than maybe a couple of minutes per week.
      - WalterSear 14y ago
        You must live an exceptionally simple life.
dangoor 14y ago
Mark Forster has written some very interesting ideas about todo lists (and the management thereof). http://markforster.squarespace.com/ http://markforster.squarespace.com/ One thing that's very cool about Mark Forster's approaches is that they have always had the notion of going with your intuition on what you should be working on and they've also had a mechanism of throwing stuff away from the list. I totally agree about todo lists generally becoming giant Katamari balls. I personally have no issue with the idea of having todo lists as long as you can throw things away comfortably.
pippy 14y ago
It's a personality thing. Some people work well with todo's, some people don't. I work better with them.
mistercow 14y ago
>If you can't wake up every day and, using your 100% original equipment God-given organic brain, come up with the three most important things you need to do that day – then you should seriously work on fixing that. Wow, talk about some ableist nonsense. Why is it so hard for people to understand that different productivity tools work well for different people? Letting go of the typical mind fallacy is a very important step in understanding how to take advice from other people.
- peterhajas 14y ago
  > discrimination in favor of able-bodied people Huh? Is the original post discriminating against people who are not able-bodied?
minhajuddin 14y ago
>I have used a lot of tools to manage my TODO lists, I even wrote one (Taskr - Simple command line utility to manage your tasks). However, I keep coming back to pen and paper. I think I get it now, The biggest drawback of the Todo list apps I've used was that they made managing my Todo lists easy. As a result of which my lists started growing. When I use pen and paper, I have to copy everything to a new page every single day, and THAT is NOT easy. It makes me think which task is worth copying. At the end of the day, this is what makes my todo lists sane. I think I am going to stick to pen and paper for my Todo lists for a long time. http://minhajuddin.com/2012/09/17/why-todo-lists-on-paper-work http://minhajuddin.com/2012/09/17/why-todo-lists-on-paper-wo...
kamaal 14y ago
>>I've tried to maintain to-do lists at various points in my life. And I've always failed. Utterly and completely. I don't know if Jeff has read "Getting Things Done" By David Allen. Or he has read "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. With Regards GTD, David Allen specifically mentions its very easy to get on and off GTD framework. Because GTD does require a level discipline to get it work. Or any Time management framework ever invented for that matter. If to-do lists are not working for you, then you have one of the signs. 1. You don't have a lot of things to do in your daily schedule at the first place. Making the purpose of list obsolete. 2. You have very few but large monolithic tasks that don't need to be written down, and generally fit in comfortably into your brain cache. 3. You are not frequently interrupted. 4. You don't procrastinate. 5. You are just not disciplined to follow the list discipline. >>Eventually I realized that the problem wasn't me. All my to-do lists started out as innocuous tools to assist me in my life, but slowly transformed, each and every time, into thankless, soul-draining exercises in reductionism. Sorry to-do lists do work. Don't make to-do lists a religious ritual you need to follow. They are there for a reason and if you fit into that framework its futile to use it. >>Lists give the illusion of progress. When were lists meant to measure progress? They are meant to track your work, your brain only has a limited capacity to store things. When you put to many to-do tasks in your brain, you start to worry about it. And then most of your energy goes into worrying than executing those tasks. The whole purpose of lists is to dump your brain on paper. Then execute them, if you are interrupted you know where to start after you get back. In other words they work like stacks in software. >>Lists give the illusion of accomplishment. Lists of completed Lists are definitely an indication of accomplishment. >>Lists make you feel guilty for not achieving these things. That is why they work in most cases. >>Lists make you feel guilty for continually delaying certain items. Lists make you feel guilty for not doing things you don't want to be doing anyway. Why do you put them on the list anyway. Lists are not books used to maintain vision statements. They are tools to put actionable items whose progress you can measure. >>Lists make you prioritize the wrong things. Lists are dumb. You create them. How can they make you prioritize wrong things. The problem is over zealousness. As I said before a list is not your vision statement. Write things in the list what you want to do. Not what you dream about, or want to have 10 years from now. David Allen covers this in his book, These sort of things should ideally go in a 10 year plan or whatever year plan and its progress must be reviewed every Saturday or so. >>Lists are inefficient. (Think of what you could be doing with all the time you spend maintaining your lists!) Think of what you could not be doing if you didn't know the time needed on what you have been doing, doing currently or likely to do in the future. How will you know where you could save time and use it elsewhere? >>Lists suck the enjoyment out of activities, making most things feel like an obligation. This is true if you work at a resort. But if you are somebody who has to 5-6 meetings, go for status updates, answer 20 emails, solve two bugs, tend to your home and track your personal projects all in a day. Without getting organized you are not going to make it. >>Lists don't actually make you more organized long term. Because you stop just there. You don't have a list of lists. >>Lists can close you off to spontaneity and exploration of things you didn't plan for. (Let's face it, it's impossible to really plan some things in life.) That is why you should run your life like an agile project and not in the waterfall model. >>If you can't wake up every day and, using your 100% original equipment God-given organic brain, come up with the three most important things you need to do that day Most people don't have 3-most important things in life. In fact lists exists because most don't have 3-most important things in life.
ak217 14y ago
This is bullshit. Todo lists are the most basic form of a tool for triaging and prioritizing your work. They are a minified, single-threaded version of issue/bug-tracking systems. If you don't need a todo list (or an issue tracker) to remember all the details of what must get done, you're either superhuman, or you're not working on a hard enough problem.
engtech 14y ago
For me the advantage of a todo list of adequate size is staying productive in the face of blocked tasks (eg: the "it's compiling" problem). I think the real secret is to disable internet access on your dev machine (and instead keep it in another room), but I find a todo list is all about keeping in flow by any means necessary and avoiding the subtle allure of the web.
aymeric 14y ago
The problem of most todo apps is that they focus on productivity (do as much as possible) rather than effectiveness (do the right thing). Try an app that helps you keep your goals in mind in your everyday workflow. http://weekplan.net http://weekplan.net (my app) is inspired by the "Put First Things First" methodology from Covey, and it works for many.
photorized 14y ago
I only write down things that are unpleasant. Don't want them in my brain cache when I go to bed at night. Normal "tasks" and creative decisions tend to bubble up and sort themselves out.
pacomerh 14y ago
If the article was talking about personal goals, then its spot on. But todo lists are needed, and they're usually sub-tasks of a greater goal.
Toenex 14y ago
In one sense Jeff is right, I have no problem remembering what I want to do today. My problem is that I need to do things that other people want me to do. Unfortunately my ability to remember is strongly weighted by my give-a-shit level. Hence a list.
verroq 14y ago
If you need a list to remember things. A list is fine. If you need a list to schedule your life. A list is not fine.
lampe 14y ago
I Don't got todo lists! I got Questions! This maybe a little bit queer but FOR ME it works! How it works: First i dont got a APP! i got a little paper notebook and when i got a Task i dont write down:"make the CSS work better". I Write:"How can you make the css better?". Mostly the questions are tighter and more to the point but this is just an example. I use diffrent Colors too ! Black/Blue just to write it down Red/Green/Orange/etc. for things that let me later know what i thought that moment. I Carry that thing always with me! ALWAYS! Maybe a Solution for a problem comes in my mind when iam at the Metro or on the Street. Why i do that? I dont like Tasks! Tasks always have this: you MUST do that and that... baaah NO I dont like it. Really DONT use a APP! Wunderlist, the milk thing, evernote etc. are ALL good app's but the just all take to long! Maybe this will change with a Touchscreen and pen but i like my paper notebook :)
speleding 14y ago
I tried a bunch of TODO and GTD apps and they always took so much time fidgeting around with that it ended up not being worth it. Then I tried "Things", and I've been using it ever since. It just has the right combination of features that do not get in the way if you don't need them. So it might be just a case of getting something that matches the way you work.
optymizer 14y ago
When I don't write things down in a TO-DO list, I always feel like I have a cloud over my head, ready to explode into a hurricane. There is this pressure and constant iteration going on: "you've got to do X", "you've go to do Y", "you've to do Z, but you haven't even started Z", and can get overwhelming at times. When you have at least 1 meeting per day at work with different teams, when you've got school and associated deadlines, when you've got a significant other, etc, you WILL BE overwhelmed with all of the things you need to do. At some point, the brain cannot hold everything into 1 context and will kill some things - some that may turn out to be important for you in the long run. So I find it very productive to write things down in one or more to-do list, and then switch contexts when the time comes. This allows me to concentrate on 1 thing at a time, knowing that I can later focus on all the other things I need to do, without dropping the ball on any of those, because I happened to forget about thing X or Y. Nowadays, the only difficulty I face is performing the actual context switch. For example, after working 8 hours in Node.js with vows, bootstrap, jqmobile, mongodb,etc, it is painful to switch to working on a POSIX-compliant memory manager in C99 and then switch into family-mode or friendly-guy mode and entertain family/friends/etc. I found that performing some completely unrelated activity (like playing basketball) helps ease the transition from one context to the other, but I don't always have a 2 hour window for a context switch. Anyways, I use trello these days. TL;DR: bullshit, TO-DO lists are very helpful and I am the living proof.
mathattack 14y ago
This is a rare instance where Jeff is wrong. There is a big difference between knowing your priorities (which Jeff describes) and knowing all the little things that need to be done or will cause problems later (what Jeff misses). I find it very important to have the To Do lists to keep track of all the little promises and expectations. Many of the great leaders I've worked with have done similar. Those that don't have someone else keeping track of their commitments. Certain creative jobs can be isolated, but jobs that require interacting with others require keeping track of all the details.

157 points by RossM 14y ago

Interesting. I really love having my todo list and projects in Omnifocus. It helps me finish things and relieves a ton of anxiety. For me, using it actually reduces stress and is pleasant.

moocow01 14y ago

Ive put it at the top of my to-do list to use my brain and gut. I think the problem with to-do lists is when people use them to track literally what they are supposed to do for the day ... you should not need a todo list to guide your day in the larger sense in my opinion. I think where they actually are useful is tracking very small postponed tasks that would otherwise be forgotten - software is filled with these sort of things and probably the reason why devs think to-do lists are so instrumental.

dwc 14y ago

I've tried and failed to use to-do lists off and on over many years. Now I'm using the ultra simple Reminders app that comes with iOS, and it's working for me. The only good thing about the app is the complete lack of features, and that it's with me always. I only put down little things that I'm likely to forget. I give myself permission in advance not to do any of them at any specific time. But when I find myself with spare time and motivation, I always have a couple of things I can pick off the list. It's helped me get a lot more little things out of the way. The big things are another matter, but with fewer little things cluttering my brain…

TeMPOraL 14y ago

I've been suspecting for last few years that reading GTD and productivity blogs in high school might have been the biggest mistake of my life, as I remember that have always drown in overloaded lists of things not yet done since that high school time, and somehow before it I never felt a need for increasing productivity. I feel that todo lists help me get through all those so called errands - stuff I want to get done, but might not particularly enjoy the "doing" part. Otherwise I would forget many of them. But in case of things that really matter for me, writing down TODOs feels silly, as I'd rather actually do the stuff, not write about it. But between work, university and my S.O., I have almost no time to actually do anything from that TODO list, so it up being a list of stuff I could have got done if I had a 40-hour day.

kiba 14y ago

I don't have anything like a todo list. But I do have habits that I followed religiously. I guess you can call it "Invisible Important TODO Items For Today". There are three items that I do every single day: 1. Write 500 words a day, in which I usually spend writing about half baked random things like "fear inoculation", "legoization" or "Conquering Rome with Science". You can see random stuff at http://kibabase.com/articles/notes-and-thoughts http://kibabase.com/articles/notes-and-thoughts 2. Walks 10K steps a day. I did it for an experiment that supposed to last 30 days, now it's in 37th days total. I am trying to build an analysis tool that output pretty JSON of my data, but somehow keep neglecting it. You can read what I have so far here: http://kibabase.com/articles/self-quantification#intervention-1---walking-10k-steps http://kibabase.com/articles/self-quantification#interventio... 3. Measure my step count, my blood pressure, my weight, and my pulse. Well, actually there's a fourth item: read a book everyday. It turns out that I didn't do the million other things that I wanted to do but never do consistently, including coding. Coding should at least be a priority. I can say with a straight face that even writing 500 words a day about random things makes progress. Out of the random things pile in my Notes and Thoughts page, I eventually spun off two essays, one of which is about my self quantification effort in which I am currently doing 10K steps a day, the others is for logging the ideas of the 16+ books I read so far this year. I expect to add more essays to my site over time as essays mature from my primordial soup of random ideas and notes. These activities help keep me healthy and sane. It also makes me feel like a badass, even when I am not.

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SCdF 14y ago

This is an interesting reaction, but I'm not sure it goes deep enough. What is a bug tracking system if not a glorified todo list? What is a shopping list if not a glorified todo: buy X list? When you think up a cool idea for a project or learn about a technology you want to explore next time it fits and add it to your project log / text file / notepad, isn't that basically a todo list? These things are really important: I can't remember every bug my software has, I often forget something I wanted to buy (goddamn avocados, honestly every time they slip my mind), and I can't work on every idea I come up with straight away. I people who have problems with todo lists are using them, I hesitate to say it, incorrectly. They shouldn't run your life, they are just a place to jot things down.

codinghorror 14y ago
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/07/09.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/07/09.html > But I have noticed that in many real-world companies, the desire never to miss any bug report leads to bug bankrupcy, where you wake up one day and discover that there are 3000 open bugs in the database, some of which are so old they may not apply any more, some of which can never be reproduced, and most of which are not even worth fixing because they’re so tiny. When you look closely you realize that months or years of work has gone into preparing those bug reports, and you ask yourself, how could we have 3000 bugs in the database while our product is delightful and customers love it and use it every day? At some point you realize that you’ve put too much work into the bug database and not quite enough work into the product. doesn't really work, though, does it?
- neilk 14y ago
  How about a radical notion - we only fix the bugs that we got a report on in the last 30 days, or that we've worked on in the past 30 days, and still seem like they are worth the trouble. If fixing the bug is really about adding a new feature, transfer it to a different list. The thing about bugs is that they get reliably re-reported over time anyway, causing you to spend even more time noting the duplicates. And for old bugs, you need to spend even more time reconfirming if they are still relevant. Everybody hates this. Why not exploit the recurrent nature of bug reports, and assume the users will ask us about it again if it matters? I can't think of an instance where we were really glad that we saved some minor bug reports from months and months ago.

scott_meade 14y ago

Jeff sums it up well: "If you can't wake up every day and, using your 100% original equipment God-given organic brain, come up with the three most important things you need to do that day – then you should seriously work on fixing that."

smegel 14y ago
So your boss comes up to you one afternoon and asks you to perform a minor, yet important task the next morning, alongside the many, many other tasks and activities, both work and private you have going on. Also, the following morning your car breaks down and you end up getting to work late and flustered. Amid all this chaos, you forget to perform the minor yet important task asked of you, and you don't remember until you see you boss walking towards you that afternoon with a concerned expression on his face. Upon reflection, a smart person would say: A) I really should write these things down somewhere, like maybe on a todo list! B) Nah, she'll be right, I won't forget next time! Hint: the answer is "A"

edanm 14y ago

Sometimes there are things I need to remember. Things like "remember to call this person on Sunday", or "remember to deal with this issue in 3 weeks". Sometimes it's personal (things like "go watch this movie that just came out"), most of the times it's professional (like "take care of that problem you had with the bank"). I don't have a good memory. I need to write these kinds of things down somewhere. It's not (and shouldn't be) that complicated, but it's definitely necessary.

nowarninglabel 14y ago
That's what a calendar for. Just think about how more effective it is to schedule a time to see a movie, rather than batting it around your to-do list. What's the point of having a "remember to deal with this issue in 3 weeks" point on your list, when it'd be much better to schedule 30 minutes in 3 weeks where you take care of the issue.
- edanm 14y ago
  What makes it better in my calendar? Here are a few reasons I prefer this in a list, and not part of my calendar: 1. My calendar tells me specific places to be or people to talk with/meet at specified times. This is important, because I've usually scheduled with these people, so it's not up to me to change it. It's a set time for dealing with something, that has to happen in that specific time. 2. For todo items like "see this movie", usually I don't need 30 minutes. I need 2 minutes to check if the movie is out, decide whether I'll see that movie today or not, and if not, move the task to another day. 3. I don't have a specific I need to deal with that task. I'd rather not postpone it 300 times. 4. I have 10's of these tasks. I really don't want them cluttering up my calendar. All of the above mean my calendar is my go-to place to see actual, important things that I've scheduled with other people. My todo list is the place to see little tasks that I need to do sometime. Perhaps on some specific day, but not in any specific time. These tend to be very different kind of tasks.
- smegel 14y ago
  > What's the point of having a "remember to deal with this issue in 3 weeks" Because it would be more like "remember to deal with this issue by 3 weeks". What's the point of a calendar entry that reminds you half an hour before a task is due? Calendars are for events, not tracking the status of a task.

outside1234 14y ago

i think i agree with the sentiment of this, but i still find a "bag of ideas" interesting to remind me of things that should be on that short list if my memory fails me.

codinghorror 14y ago
I am a fan of research notebooks, for sure, as a general place to put daydreaming and ideas that might be useful one day. But a to do list, to me, is something quite different: it is a contract that This Thing Must Be Done Eventually. I find that this is rarely the case. The things that "must" be done will get done whether they are on any list or not, e.g. What is the most important thing in life? http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/03/on-necessity.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/03/on-necessity.html

blvr 14y ago

I'm glad if going todo-less works for the author but I wouldn't recommend it. I doubt many people have the capacity to remember that meeting you're supposed to have Friday after next at 3:30 or that little bug someone just mentioned over the phone that you'll have to fix at some point when you're back at the office. Like all things, you can go to far with todo lists. Todo today lists have never worked for me. But I'd be lost without a list of appointments and minor/forgettable actions (filed according to the context in which they need to be done).

codinghorror 14y ago
I did not say or advocate going calendar-less. The trouble with to-do-ing the minor/forgettable stuff is that, over time, you end up with a big-ass Katamari ball of minor/forgettable that is kind of oppressive. Or you become a slave to getting minor/forgettable things done, out of fear that they will inevitably overwhelm you -- which they will, since there are always a zillion minor, forgettable things you could be doing. Which is worse? I think they're both pretty bad outcomes.
- blvr 14y ago
  Okay, I'm probably making that mistake because I use Todoist as both calendar and todo list. There is another option as well as the two you list, which is to remove items off your list as you can't/don't want to do them. Since I never have any more than half a dozen items on any of my three calendar/todo lists I never feel particularly oppressed. But I know that if I didn't have those lists there I'd be forgetting stuff all the time and letting people down - and I know because I never used to use a todo list.

dkarl 14y ago

I've largely replaced long-term TODO lists with calendar reminders. That's what my TODOs were anyway, reminders of what I intended to do at some point in the future, and I was always seeing items too late (ahhhhh shit shit shit!) or too early (meh, ignore) so now I just stick each item on my calendar on a date that seems appropriate. Most TODO lists that aren't reminders are just glorified brainstorming. For example, when I make a list of steps for getting something done, I consider it disposable. A task list I generate from scratch tomorrow will probably be more accurate than the one I was working from today. Like design documents, task lists are perennially stale, more harmful than helpful. The one exception to the above two rules is my shopping list, because nothing sucks more than waking up in the morning and not having any coffee.

codinghorror 14y ago
I too find the calendar much more useful than the generic to-do list. For one thing, if you can't come up with a specific date you need this done by or on... YAGNI. :)
- icebraining 14y ago
  But a calendar is just a todo list where the items appear based on a date. Your position is inconsistent, in my opinion.
  - kamaal 14y ago
    Correct, Precisely calendars are a very effective way of maintaining list of lists with deadlines(dates).
kamaal 14y ago
You replaced nothing. Now your calender is a meta list carrying your to-do lists with a reminder feature added to it. In other words you just graduated to the next level of to-do list organization. You just don't realize you have.

philsheard 14y ago

Sometimes things pop into your head at the worst time, when you can't do anything about it. However you collect it (todo list app, email, pen and paper), making a reminder is the only way not to fail at life. Real life is too complicated and too important to just forget stuff.

neilk 14y ago

There was an art project I saw a while ago where you got to confess all your undone ideas to a "priest", and you got absolved of the responsibility for doing them. Maybe this is the curse of living in a world where so much more is possible. But OP goes too far when he says that you should rely only on your brain's natural scheduling and short term memory. I mean, without a grocery list, I can't even remember all the ingredients to make a birthday cake. Prioritizing is hard. I don't think there are any simple solutions. But maybe we need some sort of trigger to know when we should throw out undone projects, or cast them into some very far back burner. What would that be?

B-Con 14y ago
> But he goes too far when he says that you should rely only on your brain's natural scheduling and short term memory. I mean, without a list, I can't even remember all the ingredients to make a birthday cake if I go to the store and that is my one and only task there. This is mainly what I do with my to-do lists. It's the odd-ball things that need to get done, but aren't pillars for future progress in the day and are out of my normal routine. To pick a random example, dropping off a letter in the mail bin. If I don't do it, I wouldn't know for the rest of the day because I'm never going to think, "Oh, I can't submit my progress report because that letter is still in my backpack!" And I don't do it often, so I'm used to ignoring the mail drop boxes anyway. Aside from my brain either randomly remembering or pulling on a long thread and re-deriving the need to mail a letter, there's no reason it would come to mind. But if I write it down on a centralized list and I repeatedly check said list, hopefully I'll catch it in time. For me, a to-do list is a set of things that need to be done that otherwise don't really fit into the normal flow of life, but still need to be done. And I have a bad memory to boot. I forget things that aren't written down all the time.

3rd3 14y ago

I’m convinced of to-do lists. There is one important rule that often helps: Don't put things on your list that take less than 10 minutes of your time. Do those things right away instead! I write my lists in SublimeText 2 using this plug-in: https://github.com/groenewege/mdTodo https://github.com/groenewege/mdTodo Basically, it provides only one shortcut for marking tasks as completed. That way I don’t lose time by fiddling with the UI of one of those to-do list apps.

btilly 14y ago

Jeff is doing it wrong. A to-do list should be for things that you need to do, not thing that you'd like to do some day. Here is what I do when I need to be particularly organized and productive. I call it a to-done list. (I'm lazy and probably have ADHD, so I never sustain. But whenever I do this it feels great, and it is never hard to start it up again when I get motivated.) I start with a small list of things that I absolutely have to do, in roughly the order that I plan to tackle them. Put that in a plain text file. Write the date below that list. Take the bottom task, break it up into subtasks, recursively, until I've got a task I can work on right now. Do it. Move it down off the list to the date. If I get blocked on that one, add the blocker below the task and pick another task. Continue all day. The next day I start by putting that day's date above the old date, and then continue again. The keys to this are the following: 1. I ONLY include things that I HAVE to do. (Adding all of the, "It would be good to some day" or "I'd like to" leads to depression as described by Jeff.) 2. Items are SPECIFIC and SMALL. The goal is to constantly move them off the list into done. 3. Only include CURRENT stuff. If there is a project that is intended for 3 months from now, it does not go on the list. This list serves 2 purposes. The bit at the top is pretty much a LIFO stack (I add at the bottom, take off from near the bottom) of what I am currently working on. So it is the whole, "I need to do Y in order to do X, be sure I get back to X eventually." And the long list at the bottom is a log of how much I got done, which makes me feel good. If you try this, be aware that a quickly growing top section is proof that you're doing it wrong. Go through the top bit and ruthlessly prune off everything that doesn't need to be there. Yes, I know that some people feel good about taking a list of high level tasks and breaking it up right away to get organized. But really, this makes the list explode, and you won't do as good a job of exploding it out as you will when you are closer to actually doing that item. The rule of thumb is, if you have trouble scrolling through the todo to the already done, the todo is clearly too long.

7402 14y ago
> Jeff is doing it wrong. A to-do list should be for things that you need to do, not thing that you'd like to do some day. Please. I think a certain amount of humility is called for when making claims about how someone ELSE could improve his or her productivity. For example, in my own practice (and contrary to the above), a to-do list has the most value to me precisely for things that I'd like to do someday, and not things I need to do now. This is because I need the list for things that tend to float out of short-term memory. I don't need it for immediate or high-priority tasks, because I tend not to forget those. People are different. It's absolutely a fine thing to say, "This practice improved my productivity. I offer it to you, for your evaluation, in case you find it helpful, too." But even if 95% of workers are more productive with practice X, maybe I am a member of the 5% minority that is more productive with practice Y. It is silly to assume that given various ways of approaching a problem, there is ONE way that will better for 100% of people . Being a professional means I own the responsibility for deciding how to accomplish something. Sometimes a group needs to reach a consensus on how to do something, e.g., pick one source code control system, rather than letting each programmer pick whichever they think makes them individually most productive. But choosing a personal to-do list is personal decison.

jiggy2011 14y ago

I need to make some sort of list or reminder for things that are important but not urgent. I lost a domain name to a squatter before because the "RENEW YOUR DOMAIN NOW" emails ended up in my junk folder.

nostromo 14y ago

All lists for me are transient and limited in scope and usually very effective. For example: "remaining things to do before shipping version x" or "things to get at Costco". I think lists break down when you try to make a single list for your whole life that lasts forever.

smegel 14y ago

I could not disagree more strongly with this post. For me, managing a todo list has been the single greatest boon to my own productivity and self-management I have ever come across. That is not to say I think most or any todo list applications are worth while - I think the vast majority of them are really terrible as they are far too complex or constraining, require too much overhead to do the simple things like creating a task or changing a task status, are too opinionated about how you deal with your todo items (like forcing schedules, reminders or due dates), lack hierarchical structure and lack any kind of free-form input. The best (and only) worthwhile app that I have ever encountered is not even a todo list app - it is simply a Google Docs document that I leave open in my browser on various computers. I use whatever kind of free form structure I want to dump my thoughts and "todo" things that I feel like at the time - and annotate task status with free text tags and tokens that suit me as I go. Various parts of the documents will at times look like todo lists, plans, schedules, itineraries, work-flows, inventories, idea-lists, collections and more - and it is constantly evolving as the state of my work and activities evolve. Important, current stuff goes at the top - for example my first two blocks are titled "Appointments" (dont want to forget those!) and "Today" (what do I absolutely need to do today). Going down the blocks tend to reduce in priority/importance - for example my very last block is called "Learning" which is a list of various things that I would like to learn more of when I have time (not that learning isn't important, but it is a long-term background activity that I don't need to be reviewing every day). If I have some thoughts or plans that I feel are important, but I dont want to focus on them now, I will just dump them in the document and move on to something else. Later I can come back and review that dump, maybe translate it into actual todo item or evolve it into a planned work-flow. This "thought dumping" is a well researched (there is a quite famous book about it I believe) way of self-management and I find it very effective. The most important thing is there is no structure, form or anything other than what I impose on myself - you literally get a blank, empty page and that is it.

dugmartin 14y ago

Maybe we should just write our todo lists on flash paper and light them up at the end of the week. If there is something important on there you would get it done and if not you can see it go bye bye in an instant. No karmic backlog.

npsimons 14y ago
I admire this solution for it's full-on tilt towards simplifying life (which may be part of what Atwood was aiming for in the original post). Being a sysadmin and programmer (esp. embedded), though, I'm always of the mind of "just reliably log as much data as possible and sort it out later; disk space is cheap; lost information is not." I would also contend, if you have an issue with writing something down and then archiving it out of your todo list, is that a problem with the system, or you? In any case, yes, logging everything may be too much for some people. Me, I don't like to lose data, even if I ignore it :)

craigvn 14y ago

Only programmers could argue about the rules of using To Do lists.

petergx 14y ago
We're like, philosophers of the mundane.
- npsimons 14y ago
  That's pretty much computer science in a nutshell.

WalterSear 14y ago

I keep my entire life in one very complex 'todo' list wiki. Every day, I refer to it, moving the 'next things to do' to a place of prominence. A couple of times a week, I sit down and spend an hour or so shuffling things around. I have been using this system for almost a decade now. If Jeff hasn't found a way to make todo lists work for him, too bad.

icebraining 14y ago
Of course, that means you spend at least thirteen full 8-hour workdays per year just shuffling your todo list.
- gurkendoktor 14y ago
  Right, but people without a To Do list also spend time thinking about the priority of things and what needs to be done. In fact, that's my personal takeaway from GTD- that the list is there to stop you from thinking about upcoming stuff all day, because it's saved somewhere and can be shuffled at a calm minute.
- WalterSear 14y ago
  How much time to do you spend thinking about what needs to be done next?
  - icebraining 14y ago
    Negligible. What I need to do is usually either what I had to do yesterday and the day before, or an immediate reaction to some event. What I want to do is best decided in the moment, when all the information (e.g. my mood, availability of other people) is available. The exceptions don't take more than maybe a couple of minutes per week.
    - WalterSear 14y ago
      You must live an exceptionally simple life.

dangoor 14y ago

Mark Forster has written some very interesting ideas about todo lists (and the management thereof). http://markforster.squarespace.com/ http://markforster.squarespace.com/ One thing that's very cool about Mark Forster's approaches is that they have always had the notion of going with your intuition on what you should be working on and they've also had a mechanism of throwing stuff away from the list. I totally agree about todo lists generally becoming giant Katamari balls. I personally have no issue with the idea of having todo lists as long as you can throw things away comfortably.

pippy 14y ago

It's a personality thing. Some people work well with todo's, some people don't. I work better with them.

mistercow 14y ago

>If you can't wake up every day and, using your 100% original equipment God-given organic brain, come up with the three most important things you need to do that day – then you should seriously work on fixing that. Wow, talk about some ableist nonsense. Why is it so hard for people to understand that different productivity tools work well for different people? Letting go of the typical mind fallacy is a very important step in understanding how to take advice from other people.

peterhajas 14y ago
> discrimination in favor of able-bodied people Huh? Is the original post discriminating against people who are not able-bodied?

minhajuddin 14y ago

>I have used a lot of tools to manage my TODO lists, I even wrote one (Taskr - Simple command line utility to manage your tasks). However, I keep coming back to pen and paper. I think I get it now, The biggest drawback of the Todo list apps I've used was that they made managing my Todo lists easy. As a result of which my lists started growing. When I use pen and paper, I have to copy everything to a new page every single day, and THAT is NOT easy. It makes me think which task is worth copying. At the end of the day, this is what makes my todo lists sane. I think I am going to stick to pen and paper for my Todo lists for a long time. http://minhajuddin.com/2012/09/17/why-todo-lists-on-paper-work http://minhajuddin.com/2012/09/17/why-todo-lists-on-paper-wo...

kamaal 14y ago

>>I've tried to maintain to-do lists at various points in my life. And I've always failed. Utterly and completely. I don't know if Jeff has read "Getting Things Done" By David Allen. Or he has read "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. With Regards GTD, David Allen specifically mentions its very easy to get on and off GTD framework. Because GTD does require a level discipline to get it work. Or any Time management framework ever invented for that matter. If to-do lists are not working for you, then you have one of the signs. 1. You don't have a lot of things to do in your daily schedule at the first place. Making the purpose of list obsolete. 2. You have very few but large monolithic tasks that don't need to be written down, and generally fit in comfortably into your brain cache. 3. You are not frequently interrupted. 4. You don't procrastinate. 5. You are just not disciplined to follow the list discipline. >>Eventually I realized that the problem wasn't me. All my to-do lists started out as innocuous tools to assist me in my life, but slowly transformed, each and every time, into thankless, soul-draining exercises in reductionism. Sorry to-do lists do work. Don't make to-do lists a religious ritual you need to follow. They are there for a reason and if you fit into that framework its futile to use it. >>Lists give the illusion of progress. When were lists meant to measure progress? They are meant to track your work, your brain only has a limited capacity to store things. When you put to many to-do tasks in your brain, you start to worry about it. And then most of your energy goes into worrying than executing those tasks. The whole purpose of lists is to dump your brain on paper. Then execute them, if you are interrupted you know where to start after you get back. In other words they work like stacks in software. >>Lists give the illusion of accomplishment. Lists of completed Lists are definitely an indication of accomplishment. >>Lists make you feel guilty for not achieving these things. That is why they work in most cases. >>Lists make you feel guilty for continually delaying certain items. Lists make you feel guilty for not doing things you don't want to be doing anyway. Why do you put them on the list anyway. Lists are not books used to maintain vision statements. They are tools to put actionable items whose progress you can measure. >>Lists make you prioritize the wrong things. Lists are dumb. You create them. How can they make you prioritize wrong things. The problem is over zealousness. As I said before a list is not your vision statement. Write things in the list what you want to do. Not what you dream about, or want to have 10 years from now. David Allen covers this in his book, These sort of things should ideally go in a 10 year plan or whatever year plan and its progress must be reviewed every Saturday or so. >>Lists are inefficient. (Think of what you could be doing with all the time you spend maintaining your lists!) Think of what you could not be doing if you didn't know the time needed on what you have been doing, doing currently or likely to do in the future. How will you know where you could save time and use it elsewhere? >>Lists suck the enjoyment out of activities, making most things feel like an obligation. This is true if you work at a resort. But if you are somebody who has to 5-6 meetings, go for status updates, answer 20 emails, solve two bugs, tend to your home and track your personal projects all in a day. Without getting organized you are not going to make it. >>Lists don't actually make you more organized long term. Because you stop just there. You don't have a list of lists. >>Lists can close you off to spontaneity and exploration of things you didn't plan for. (Let's face it, it's impossible to really plan some things in life.) That is why you should run your life like an agile project and not in the waterfall model. >>If you can't wake up every day and, using your 100% original equipment God-given organic brain, come up with the three most important things you need to do that day Most people don't have 3-most important things in life. In fact lists exists because most don't have 3-most important things in life.

ak217 14y ago

This is bullshit. Todo lists are the most basic form of a tool for triaging and prioritizing your work. They are a minified, single-threaded version of issue/bug-tracking systems. If you don't need a todo list (or an issue tracker) to remember all the details of what must get done, you're either superhuman, or you're not working on a hard enough problem.

engtech 14y ago

For me the advantage of a todo list of adequate size is staying productive in the face of blocked tasks (eg: the "it's compiling" problem). I think the real secret is to disable internet access on your dev machine (and instead keep it in another room), but I find a todo list is all about keeping in flow by any means necessary and avoiding the subtle allure of the web.

aymeric 14y ago

The problem of most todo apps is that they focus on productivity (do as much as possible) rather than effectiveness (do the right thing). Try an app that helps you keep your goals in mind in your everyday workflow. http://weekplan.net http://weekplan.net (my app) is inspired by the "Put First Things First" methodology from Covey, and it works for many.

photorized 14y ago

I only write down things that are unpleasant. Don't want them in my brain cache when I go to bed at night. Normal "tasks" and creative decisions tend to bubble up and sort themselves out.

pacomerh 14y ago

If the article was talking about personal goals, then its spot on. But todo lists are needed, and they're usually sub-tasks of a greater goal.

Toenex 14y ago

In one sense Jeff is right, I have no problem remembering what I want to do today. My problem is that I need to do things that other people want me to do. Unfortunately my ability to remember is strongly weighted by my give-a-shit level. Hence a list.

verroq 14y ago

If you need a list to remember things. A list is fine. If you need a list to schedule your life. A list is not fine.

lampe 14y ago

I Don't got todo lists! I got Questions! This maybe a little bit queer but FOR ME it works! How it works: First i dont got a APP! i got a little paper notebook and when i got a Task i dont write down:"make the CSS work better". I Write:"How can you make the css better?". Mostly the questions are tighter and more to the point but this is just an example. I use diffrent Colors too ! Black/Blue just to write it down Red/Green/Orange/etc. for things that let me later know what i thought that moment. I Carry that thing always with me! ALWAYS! Maybe a Solution for a problem comes in my mind when iam at the Metro or on the Street. Why i do that? I dont like Tasks! Tasks always have this: you MUST do that and that... baaah NO I dont like it. Really DONT use a APP! Wunderlist, the milk thing, evernote etc. are ALL good app's but the just all take to long! Maybe this will change with a Touchscreen and pen but i like my paper notebook :)

speleding 14y ago

I tried a bunch of TODO and GTD apps and they always took so much time fidgeting around with that it ended up not being worth it. Then I tried "Things", and I've been using it ever since. It just has the right combination of features that do not get in the way if you don't need them. So it might be just a case of getting something that matches the way you work.

optymizer 14y ago

When I don't write things down in a TO-DO list, I always feel like I have a cloud over my head, ready to explode into a hurricane. There is this pressure and constant iteration going on: "you've got to do X", "you've go to do Y", "you've to do Z, but you haven't even started Z", and can get overwhelming at times. When you have at least 1 meeting per day at work with different teams, when you've got school and associated deadlines, when you've got a significant other, etc, you WILL BE overwhelmed with all of the things you need to do. At some point, the brain cannot hold everything into 1 context and will kill some things - some that may turn out to be important for you in the long run. So I find it very productive to write things down in one or more to-do list, and then switch contexts when the time comes. This allows me to concentrate on 1 thing at a time, knowing that I can later focus on all the other things I need to do, without dropping the ball on any of those, because I happened to forget about thing X or Y. Nowadays, the only difficulty I face is performing the actual context switch. For example, after working 8 hours in Node.js with vows, bootstrap, jqmobile, mongodb,etc, it is painful to switch to working on a POSIX-compliant memory manager in C99 and then switch into family-mode or friendly-guy mode and entertain family/friends/etc. I found that performing some completely unrelated activity (like playing basketball) helps ease the transition from one context to the other, but I don't always have a 2 hour window for a context switch. Anyways, I use trello these days. TL;DR: bullshit, TO-DO lists are very helpful and I am the living proof.

mathattack 14y ago

This is a rare instance where Jeff is wrong. There is a big difference between knowing your priorities (which Jeff describes) and knowing all the little things that need to be done or will cause problems later (what Jeff misses). I find it very important to have the To Do lists to keep track of all the little promises and expectations. Many of the great leaders I've worked with have done similar. Those that don't have someone else keeping track of their commitments. Certain creative jobs can be isolated, but jobs that require interacting with others require keeping track of all the details.