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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 th

by 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.

by neilk 14y ago

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.