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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

I noticed many people doing the same thing with "to do"/"to read" lists. They'll add items to their lists thinking they'll get around to doing them some day, not realizing that future me is probably just as lazy as present me, and if I were going to do something, I would have done it now.

So, todo lists become a bit of intellectual masturbation in the sense of "oh I'm not putting this off, I'm definitely going to do it, since it's on my todo list!"

I have on my todo list (see the irony) to build a mobile todo list app where tasks will disappear if not finished in a while, along with some other bells and whistles (they'll all move to another screen where you can't remove them and they'll mock you for ever), mostly as an art piece on this exact phenomenon rather than a useful app.

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Todo lists are useful to keep track of all the tasks in one place and not to hold them in your head.

I heard of businessmen who as a rule of thumb delegate or delete tasks after not being able to start within 3 days.

So it is matter of your system how you use your todo list

I found maintaining a TODO list was helpful in seeing how fragmented my ideas were, which helped me to start actually doing things, because for one thing, I realized that I had forgotten most of my (fragmented and peculiar) ideas, and even more so, there were ideas that I found important most of the time I eyed the activities on my TODO list. Still, even without this insight, I'd say one asks himself quite often "What I should do now" in terms of reading/watching a movie/etc., and to answer that TODO list is honestly pretty helpful.

I've found that todo lists only work if they're put in context of larger goals and you have a system to repeatedly, frequently pop() the top of the list. It's OK (and common!) to have a todo list of 100 things, as long as you give yourself time to think about prioritization of the tasks. Someone on here recommended "Work Clean" by Charnas. It's a little fluffy at the end, but he does provides a structure with which to place and schedule tasks that I found pretty useful called Daily Meeze. It's just meta-planning (plan/schedule 30 minutes out of every day to plan/schedule). Super simple, yet effective.

This is a useful way to handle tasks. It sounds like backlog grooming in scrum. It's nice to just write down the various ideas you get, regularly prioritize them, then grab a few of them per sprint to finish and deploy to prod at the end of that sprint.

> I noticed many people doing the same thing with "to do"/"to read" lists. They'll add items to their lists thinking they'll get around to doing them some day, not realizing that future me is probably just as lazy as present me, and if I were going to do something, I would have done it now.

Guilty as charged. That said, the primary purpose of my "to read" list today is to short-circuit my procrastination loop; when I realize it's high time to get back to work, I'll quickly scroll through the remaining 20 open tabs, put some on my "toread" list, and close the others.

Too bad your idea to build that app won't disappear :D

I've found a way to combat this. I assign a "due in" value to each of my todo items, from 1 week to 3 months. Then every week, I visit all the overdue items, do at least one step to push it further, then push it out according to its "due in" value.

So high priority items get more attention and nothing will be put off indefinitely.

I have a couple things written on a post-it note. Sometimes I lose the note. Nothing bad happens. The really important stuff will either get done or find its way back to a post-it note.

This is so true. To add to it, you almost get a high adding things to a todo list rather than taking things off.

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