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 co

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.