Use your brain to its fullest: Biological Task List

If this works for you, then more power to you. I ran my life with nothing more than an occasional daily todo list for years. The thing is though, once you get busier, once your startup is growing into the double-digit employees, once you start receiving 100+ significant emails a day, once you have a family, the stuff that has to get done starts to outstrip your mental capacity (at least it did for me). And then that's when the stress starts building.

I am not a fan of productivity porn. Ironically I think it's often just a way that people procrastinate from what really matters. But eventually I had to give in to the fact that however I used to cope wasn't working anymore. I recently picked up David Allen's Getting Things Done, and I'm applying it using OmniFocus. The thing I like about it is that it acknowledges the mental baggage that information workers carry around, and it provides a practical system to free your mind from remembering tons of tasks (something which we are not evolutionarily set up for). It's hard to overstate what this has done for my stress level and creativity. It's not about maintaining lists, it's about freeing up my RAM.

The brain sucks at keeping a todo list. GTD means committing it to paper. When memorized list items start to dissipate, stress and insecurity increases. You remember that you had to do something, but you forgot what that something was. You can't trust the brain to keep a simple todo list, yet the OP tells us to do just that.

Though if you do want to train your brain to memorize objects, I'd try to master the Memory Palace technique. The lazy could even visualize writing down todo items on a simple piece of paper.

A task list should enhance your productivity by offloading bookkeeping. That's it. If you need people to yell at you (as the OP says) to determine priority, you are probably working in a painful and interrupt-driven way.

Here's my method (for writing software):

  1) Blank sheet of paper (8am).
  2) Figure out one thing to do, and write it down on just one line.
  3) Finish that thing.
  4) Check that item off, and write down the next task *before you put down your pen*.
  5) Goto 3.

This is how I stay focused without trying to forecast too far into the future.

I use a todo list app (Things) for everything except my work. The post is right that you tend to remember things that you care about, but unfortunately my time cannot be entirely filled with things I care about.

This is a much better lecture on this topic. Raundy Pausch was an awesome speaker. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0

It is notable that this idea is the exact opposite of GTD - in GTD you write everything down to eliminate stress. Here, you use your stress to help yourself prioritize.