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Can someone explain to me the apparently common obsession with creating to-do lists and chat programs? I can't figure out why so many people devote this much of

• DougWebb 12y ago
  Developers tend to have a lot of activities and tasks they need to keep track of, and it's too much to remember. So we all wind up making lists: on paper, on whiteboards, in text files, in email, in apps. These lists always start out being fairly simple and manageable, but they also always grow into an unmanageable mess. Being developers, we wind up blaming the record-keeping tool for the unmanageable mess rather than our own habits. That leads us to think that if we could just create a better tool for keeping track of our TODO list, our lives would be easier to manage, and maybe others could benefit from the tool as well. Of course it never seems to pan out, because what we're trying to manage is our (work) lives, and our lives cannot be represented as a simple task list. There's a lot more nuance and complexity to it. And that's why we end up with a million different implementations of simple TODO lists.
  • artursapek 12y ago
    That sounds very plausible. Thanks for the insight.