Who Uses To-Do Lists? | Hacker News Reader

Who Uses To-Do Lists?

arunkprasad.com

217 pointsakprasad200 comments

Every (long term) successful person I have met used todo lists.

Having a system to do things is like having good form when playing and instrument (or some sport). You can get quite far without getting the basics right, but then you hit a limit you can't get past it without fundamentally changing things. You can even get injured very easily (literally in sports, burnt out on a desk / management job) or you can just slowly become dead wood over time.

Changing how to do the fundamentals is more and more difficult with experience and age. Once you hit a plateau (or you are already overwhelmed and incapable of coping with things) most people will not be able to start re-learning to do things from scratch neither accept the hit on their productivity for a significant amount of time until they manage to do things on top of the new system.

My advice to those of you who are still young: do count on your immense energy and raw (intelectual) brute force if/as needed but please dedicate a conscious amount of time to deliberately develop a system which is sustainable and can grow with you as needed. You will need to rely on the expertise of others who have already gone very far, in the same way you need to trust your tennis trainer in how to use the racquet. You won't find out by yourself whether you are holding it wrong until you have already hurt yourself. So go and find some system like Getting Things Done or similar, learn it, use it and practice, practice and practice. If you look for role models just search for those people who are very productive in an apparently effortless and natural way. Those are the ones to learn from.

Thank you for this wonderful comment. I'm especially struck by that word "fundamentals," as I think their very ordinariness makes them easy to neglect.

I tried working through some of that conceptual space here:

https://arunkprasad.com/log/amateurs-and-professionals/

One my sports coaches used to say “you can’t have fun, without da mentals.” It’s a dumb joke but it’s stuck with me and helps me get through the small things sometimes.

>If you look for role models just search for those people who are very productive in an apparently effortless and natural way. Those are the ones to learn from.

When you have reached the intermediate stage, yes. It is a general rule that it takes a lot of effort to make things look effortless.

I always laugh at the "he makes it look easy". After enough practice, it is easy. That's the whole point of the practice!

There is a lot of proof to this. I am an zealous hockey fan, and a lot of the best players in the NHL still use many of the drills they learned as kids. It's not that they mastered the fundamentals, it's that they never stopped practicing them, and never will stop practicing them. Of course, they also use more complex practice routines, but they build on the fundamentals not FIFO them.

I find them situationally very useful. I'm very much an on-again-off-again todo:er, depending on what life throws my way. If I have enough ideas to require them I'll use them, if I don't then I don't. I don't spend a lot of time making sure they're in some sense perfect, it's just a tool, if it gets the job done it's fine. If there's too much junk, I'll delete some of it.

If I'm inspired I may have many more ideas than I have time to realistically implement. Putting them in a todo list helps me let go of them until I have the time to put them into action.

I also believe in separating thinking from doing, spending time away from my projects thinking seems to consistently produce solid new takes, but that is rarely the case if I'm actually at the keyboard working. I get too much tunnel vision and just spin my wheels.

This in part also to allow me to be a present in my relationships, to work at work. If I had to juggle all my ideas in my head, I'd be aloof and incommunicable most of the time.

TODO lists are the cornerstone of my ability to get practically any task that can't be done immediately and finished today done at some point.

But it's important to ensure those lists are kept somewhere visible at the start of the day. Also constant updating, rewriting, and reprioritizing I find are key to their effectiveness.

agree, also similar username

I too wouldn’t get anything done and would forget everything if it weren’t for the Reminders app on my iPhone.

In the past I tried more GTD focused apps with contexts, inboxes, start dates, due dates etc. but I’d spend more time tinkering with my todo’s than actually doing them.

Now I just dump something into the app with a due date of today. At the end of the day if I cannot do it, I move it to a sensible day I know I can do it, or if I still don’t know, tomorrow.

Also great for keeping track of repeating tasks like home maintenance.

I have two levels of to-do lists, and it's worked out pretty well for me. They're strictly for work though, I don't usually use them for my personal life:

Every morning I open an empty file in vim and create a list of things I intend to do that day. It's created completely from scratch without bringing anything over from the previous day, so this list doesn't end up growing forever with things I didn't get to, specifically to avoid that mental weight of "I have too much going on". I also remove them from the file as they're completed, instead of any sort of "mark as done", so it visibly gets smaller over the day and triggers an "I'm alllllmost done, let's finish these last things quickly" mindset instead of procrastinating as is easy when seeing a large list of things to do.

Then I use taskwarrior for anything I expect to last more than a day. I rely on its "urgency" column for prioritization, which I tweaked only once or twice in the 7 or so years I've been using it (mainly so team projects have increased urgency and special tags like "Hold" have it decreased). I rarely look at this one except when adding to it or when making the morning list, so I'll often come back to it and find a couple tasks I'd finished like a week or more ago and then spend a bit of time cleaning it up. So even though it can get big, I don't end up spending a lot of time optimizing it.

I think your method has worked well for me. I use Microsoft ToDo as a tool for it. It has a My Day list that automatically clears itself each day (by copying to Tasks). You can then re-add to your My Day list as needed.

I do something a little odd with daily to-do lists: I make them nearly exhaustive.

Everything I'm planning to do that day goes on the list. Even if it's low-priority or non-urgent. Even obvious stuff that's part of my routine like "take a shower" or "eat lunch". And leisure stuff like "watch football game". If I really intend to do it today, it gets included.

One benefit is it helps me avoid being over-optimistic about how much time I have. If only certain select items are written down, it's too easy to look at it and get a false idea that I don't have that much to do.

The other benefit is I find it easier to think about. If some items are implicitly going to happen and others are written down, then working with the list is a process of trying to simultaneously read some things and remember others. It just works better if I see everything all together in one place.

I do this to a lesser extent by putting scheduled meetings on my daily work to-do lists. It feels a bit silly sometimes (they’re going to get done whether I want them to or not), but I feel like crossing them off helps with daily momentum.

Thanks for sharing. I think I’ll give this a try.

Obsidian has a plug-in called Day Planner that sets up a very nice timeline alongside / integrated into your todo list.

Let's consider the alternatives to to-do lists. They are 1) remember everything without writing it down, or 2) rely on being reminded about anything important by something or someone else. I don't think I've missed any, and it's pretty obvious to me why 1 and 2 are bad plans... so obvious that I'm confused about why so many people blog or write books about the concept.

If you're sincerely confused, here are some reasons people avoid them:

- https://blog.codinghorror.com/todont/

- https://hbr.org/2012/01/to-do-lists-dont-work

- https://blog.frantic.im/all/todo-apps-are-meant-for-robots/

I also saw a recent HN comment that todo lists are basically suitable only for low-level ICs and that the truly successful don't use them. I wondered if that was really true and, well, here we are.

[edit]: I think there's also an issue that people can't self-regulate very well, so when they fail, they blame whatever system they use. So I wanted a clear signpost I could point to make it utterly clear that successful people do use these things (and, therefore, that any misgivings have other roots).

A lot of the criticisms I’m seeing here are how you approach your todo list. If you look at it as a script for your whole life of course it’s going to fail, you’ll spend more time setting it up and consulting it than doing anything with it, and it’ll quickly get swamped with irrelevant details. If you use it as a ‘living document’ that jogs your memory for what needs to get done it’s going to work out better. Often times just putting something on paper helps organize your thoughts around something and commit it to memory.

Wow, the first article is just awful.

He's not even saying that to-do lists don't help. He's saying that if they do help you, you're broken.

Congratulations on having never forgotten something important, I guess? I apologize for being a mere mortal who gets distracted and forgets things sometimes.

Problem is, author likely hand waves your concern away. If it was truly that important you wouldn't have forgotten it. :vomit:

It’s a part of the “everything you do must be awesome” movement. They forget that most people have a job and a personal life to take care of. Ticking items in a todo list is perfectly fine. Also I had a feeling their main argument is that they’re getting overwhelmed by the list itself. I guess it can be a problem, but the solution is to learn to let your list go sometimes. You must re-assess it regularly.

> Also I had a feeling their main argument is that they’re getting overwhelmed by the list itself. I guess it can be a problem, but the solution is to learn to let your list go sometimes.

Yeah, near the end:

> Here's my challenge. If you can't wake up every day and, using your 100% original equipment God-given organic brain, come up with the three most important things you need to do that day – then you should seriously work on fixing that. I don't mean install another app, or read more productivity blogs and books. You have to figure out what's important to you and what motivates you; ask yourself why that stuff isn't gnawing at you enough to make you get it done. Fix that.

He's kinda indirectly saying you should have a daily to-do list, started anew instead of ever-growing, just avoiding using the term "to-do list".

Amusing little aside, I use "to-do list" instead of "todo list" because I can't help read it as the Spanish "todo", which would translate to "everything list". That would be too overwhelming a list.

That quote is the perfect definition of "everything you do must be awesome".

Guess I’m broken. Fortunately, because I have a good to-do list, I can brute force my way through the brokenness and actually be productive.

I envy people who can remember all their obligations with storing them somewhere. I am not one of those people.

Articles like this leave me wondering how they really live their lives. I don't know if I smell BS but most people who use todo lists aren't todo-ing their whole day, nor wasting time adding things to it they never do. I've also never felt the need to download multiple apps. My calendar app works for long-term and paper & pen can handle the rest.

I think the articles you link are mistaken and that OP is correct. This is quote from one of them says it all: "I've tried to maintain to-do lists at various points in my life."

Of course don't do that. Todolists are there to help you remember things, not to be "maintained" or to provide you with a sense of "achievement" or whatnot. They are basically the same thing as a shopping list. Nothing more, nothing less.

The first step to actually use a todolist is not to use fancy Todolist apps. Just use Notepad or whatever simple text editor that can do cut/paste.

I completely agree (I'm the post author). I found a simple text file works well for me. I think what's most important is that I can get in the habit of using it every day. Most else is just window-dressing.

I use them at work, I have the habit of looking at my todolist when I have nothing to do, or to decide what to do next. Actually we use a ticket system that could act as a todolist, but it's a mess for "local" reasons.

This remembers me that tickets systems are just glorified todolists - and maybe they suffer from the same feature bloat as todolist apps. Although I acknowledge ticket systems are team tools, so it is a whole different game.

Yes, and learn to let the list go sometimes. Re-assess it, toss it away and make another one, etc. It’s much better to consciously ignore/forget about some tasks (because they have become unimportant) than to unwillingly forget something important.

That's why I don't like them having a 'done' column (or bucket, state, whatever) - they should be at most archived, if not just outright deleted, IMO. Just to-do, maybe optionally doing, and gone. Gone for whatever reason. And then you're never tempted to play the silly game of 'add task I already did so that I can tick it off'.

Yes. My Todolist is a textfile with one horizontal bar (=====). Above it are the things to do, below the thing that I did. When something gets urgent I move the item just above the bar. When I do something I just move the line under the bar.

I do that because sometimes I don't remember if I did something or not. Or because I need to add details about how I did it (or why I couldn't do it, sometimes). I have this additional rule that, when a task needs extra info, they are indented right after the item line.

Actually the whole thing is one section of a VimWiki file, but I use none of the features of the plugin for this. It does have single-keystroke checkboxes; I use that for checklists, which are sort of "repeatable todolists".

Same system here. It’s simple and effective.

There is nothing bad about choosing to to do some tasks. You have infinite things you can do and only finite time -> conclusion is that you will only do an infinitesimal amount of what could theoretically be done.

That makes it infinitely more important that you do the right thing, and so you should be ruthless when you make your choices.

Everyone has their own way to be effective and productive, my opinion follows.

TODO-lists are useful when using them for what they are good for:

1. mini-planning the upcoming work,

2. tracking what you've done (the ticked boxes), and

3. tracking what needs to be done to complete the main task (the unticked boxes).

Putting this information into the calendar? No, totally wrong place. Using some app? Clumsy and annoying and easy to get distracted... but sure, if it works for you.

I'd say just use a text file with whatever format is OK for you. Or pen + paper.

I have TODO-lists with tasks with a time-span of a few weeks to many-a-day subtasks that I plan ahead of time so I know what to do next.

In my opinion, that's the important part: knowing what to do next.

If you don't know what to do next, you have to stop to figure this out. Hence the TODO-lists.

Besides, for me, this switching of mode from executing to planning/analyzing breaks the flow of the task I was doing. I have to go into another kind of mind-state. So I try to plan ahead and then just execute, it's easier and more fun to just keep the flow going for a longer time.

Usually my subtask planning for things I'm familiar with is more tactical and I just throw it in as I go (I'm used to this now), but for unfamiliar things I have to stop and analyze things up front. Of course situations change and then I just go back and modify the tasks and plans. But at some point, a clear path forward emerges. Then I take it.

These common reasons listed in these types of articles do not support the conclusion that todo lists don’t work.

They are a list of some common challenges when working with todo lists. But what working method doesn’t have challenges?

I could compose a list of various challenges of working from home. It does not mean working from home, “doesn’t work”.

I completely agree! And I myself use a to-do list. I mention these just to illustrate why some might disagree that to-do lists are obvious.

The article uses Da Vinci and Musk as examples, and they had some success.

That said, “assess a corpse using his finger as a unit of measurement.” Was a to-do item.

>> I also saw a recent HN comment that todo lists are basically suitable only for low-level ICs and that the truly successful don't use them. I wondered if that was really true and, well, here we are.

Would love the link if you can find it.

I know around ~10 very successful people (high net worth business owners / C level positions), including some close family members, and they all use TODOs / notes extensively in their personal life and at work. Some have personal assistants that serve a similar function (and they rely heavily on them). We had a joke for one of them that he makes notes to look at other notes (based somewhat in reality - it was a fridge note to look at the longer note on his desk). Many of the older ones have a daily journal where they copy / delete uncompleted tasks to the next day I can't imagine any of them functioning without a TODO system.

They do also heavily use calanders and sometimes the TODO lists and calendars blend together, but it's not a mutually exclusive thing like the original post's links would leave one to believe.

The last article you link is the only one that makes some good points IMO and it's more of an argument for an even better task list if anything.

From the first article:

I think most people don't have the money to go on a years-long soul searching trip while getting nothing done in the meantime. I dislike that trend of saying "you aren't a perfectly functionning human? Time to go on therapy and focus on self-improvement for a few years". I work with half-broken systems all the time, I'm one of those. And it works! I'm able to do stuff, be kinda productive at work, spend good time with family and friends, and even find a bit of time to work on myself to get better.

Downside of to-do lists

1. You spend too much time optimizing your to-do list. 2. You realize you are spending too much time optimizing your to-do list and you give up in frustration because you feel like you don't get your actual work done.

With a text file, it's a free for all, you don't feel obligated to keep it clean, when you have to make a note you just "do it".

It’s just definitional at this point - I’d say that a text file counts as a to do list.

I am confused. The assumption here seems to be that people are using to-do lists to... schedule their lives or something? Otherwise what you said makes zero sense to me.

Either way, I cannot relate at all

Yes, some people make a hobby out of the lists themselves. That's probably not a good idea. The solution is not "stop making lists."

> 2) rely on being reminded about anything important by something or someone else.

Isn't that what a to-do list is—just a reminder of anything important by something else?

No, it’s a reminder from your past self. For example: at any given time, I’m usually supervising 6 to 10 students at the same time. In one day I might have 4 or 5 meetings, and I might promise, to each of them, to do something until our next meeting. But in the next two days I have other stuff to do, so I’ll only get to it a few days later. Each of these promises is important to me, and I don’t want to let them down, but expecting myself to remember each of them is a self-sabotage. I need a todo list. Also saying that “if I forgot is because it wasn’t really important” would make me an awful supervisor.

One of the most impactful signals we can give to others is writing information and promises that arise between us.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm writing down that I promised you that book so I can get it for you for your birthday."

"Oh, that's awesome. Thank you."

Is it obvious? I forget many things but the rarely ever the most urgent/important tasks i have to do right now.

I need a calendar and checklists for sure but when i write to do lists they inevitably end up being things i'd never forget mixed in with a clutter of tasks that were never really important enough to get around to doing.

I don't use hand written or electronic lists or reminder systems. You might say I use a biological memory system but I don't see it in any way as a list. I'm aware that I have tasks, and they have deadlines, priorities, effort levels, complexities, dependencies, relationships, and so forth. But it is so alien to me to put them in an app or on paper. I've tried, since others swear by it. But it makes as much sense to me as writing down the words I know so that I can later use them in the right order at the right times. It's a huge reduction in dimensionality for no purpose.

The discourse is often that there are two groups 1. those that use todo lists and are more productive than if they didn't 2. those that don't use todo lists but could be more productive if they did

I genuinely feel there is a third group, those that do not use todo lists and would not be any more productive if they did. I don't avoid them, I've tried them with their doctrines because they were recommended by others. Didn't add anything at all. I have no 'todo pain points', rarely if ever feel I've forgotten something or would have been aided with a 'list'. I have a good memory/recall capacity but not especially good so it is not that.

I do create 'lists' to add memory, but these are along the lines of the 40 items of grocery to buy, or clicking 'add to list' on Netflix. Not 'todo' lists as such.

I'm interested if anyone else feels similar.

I couldn't be more different. I probably wouldn't even get out of bed each day unless I wrote down what to eat for Breakfast the night before.

To mentally keep track of your entire life, from "in 1 years time I need to get my boiler serviced" to buying birthday gifts on time to completing school/college assignments on time without ever forgetting anything is from point of my view an astounding achievement.

If I were to follow such a system I would be constantly racked with anxiety that I had promised someone I would do something and then forgotten about it, or needed to pay a bill, return a library book, eat some food before it went off, etc. etc. Perhaps I just have a terrible memory.

... 3) forgetting stuff, as a crude approach to prioritization

Agree with the article - the take presented in the first articles are a joke right?

They remind of the mind numbingly arrogant articles about UHNWI's that didn't have smartphones from a while back - well duh, they didn't because they had several servants that fixed their calendar, printed things, arranged meetings etc.

Same with the "no tech" Silicon Valley trend that's an incredible privilege not applicable to 99% of regular people.

You need a place to mentally park various things you need to do, ie. a todo list in todays complicated and advanced society - pay this bill, buy this thing, call this person etc.

Complexity falls with privilege.

You can't simply remember them unless living a very simple life. Maybe some very rich person can have a PA, live in the woods, or the hermit geniuses of 200 years ago worked very differently on paper and in notebooks, but today a simple todo list is absolutely needed unless living alone and with very, very few responsibilities.

I don't know anyone, like at all that doesn't have some kind of todo list, ranging from a simple unsorted list, to multiple lists to post it notes in your apartment.

>I don't know anyone, like at all that doesn't have some kind of todo list, ranging from a simple unsorted list, to multiple lists to post it notes in your apartment.

i don't use a todo list. i either remember to do something or i don't. i have tried to use todo lists before but they have never worked. i just forget to check it, or i just don't end up doing the things written on it.

But don't you use some physical system then? Setting a post-it, putting bills in a stack in sight, opening a tab and not closing it etc. to alert you of something?

I mean i'm impressed if you can do everything stream-of-consciousness, but i also own both a company and have a family and could probably get away without lists when i was 22 without such distractions, but now i need to do at least 10+ things everyday, i can't remember all of that.

I would love to simplify my life but it doesn't seem feasible..

> putting bills in a stack in sight

What is this, the '90s?

I hope you don’t mind the question, it’s not meant in a bad way, it’s pure curiosity and surprise: do you have a high-level, high-paying position and/or a family (kids)? Meaning, critical things that are negatively affected by the things you might simply not do?

no i dont, and you're correct that these things are related. im not saying that my way of life is good, quite the opposite in fact.

Thank you for the reply, it's not really about right or wrong, it's just different. I guess in one way or another you will find yourself at the situation where you have too much to remember, and you might open a new text file.

> The take presented in the first articles are a joke right?

Yes, very much so. This is my first time writing for a large audience and I’m still learning how to balance the tone. My true views are at the bottom of the post and are aligned with yours.

>This is my first time writing for a large audience and I’m still learning how to balance the tone.

You may want to read up on Poe's Law[0].

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

Thanks for the reminder. I thought the juxtaposition of those links with people like Leonardo da Vinci and Paul Graham would be enough to make the sarcasm clear. But alas.

I think it was really good! IMHO it’s much better to leave it open for interpretation.

Thank you! That's encouraging to hear.

I know, we agree i think your entire article including the first links just sparked the same feelings as they did in you. Good job honestly!

There was a good discussion a few months ago about the high attrition/ low retention rates of todo apps:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28010716

As usual, YMMV, but it’s certainly a prevalent enough phenomenon to indicate that todo lists aren’t enough for many people.

Interesting. Personally i think i also think it has to do with the nature of those services, it's just too simple in essence, the overhead gets obvious.

People just revert to a simple piece of paper, a txt file, as i did until i for some reason started using the Reminders app in osx/ios - the first actual app that i have used for more than a year. Stupidly simple and a part of the system already so makes sense.

I've found todo lists useful for breaking down complex tasks and serving as an anxiety sink for "I'm going to forget something" or to get it off my mind while I'm laying in bed.

eg: Moving house, I generally list out the things I think I need to do, and as sub bullets break down those if they have actionable single items. It also helps me when I have time, motivation, but uncertainty what to do next -- I can just grab any item in that list and know it's moving me marginally closer to the goal.

The calendar-as-todo-list advice might be suitable for busy managers, but seems quite unsuitable for engineers, scientists and any kind of „makers“ who can rarely tell how long solving a problem will take.

Some reasons why can be found in Paul Grahams well-known essay „Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule“. Another one is getting the various random demands occurring in life out of the head so that it is free for difficult things that require full attention.

If you want to use calendars, the idea of the „unschedule“ from „The Now Habit“ might be more suitable for makers: Only put meetings, chores and actual freetime into your calendar so that it becomes obvious when there are blocks of time for focused work.

(Todo)Lists are a very useful tool, when used effectively. They need to be accompanied by a list of principles though. Here are a few:

- Review them regularly to keep them current. Pull out your lists whenever you have the time. Add new subtasks, check off done tasks, reorg lists if necessary. Keep your lists alive.

- Focus on the most valuable tasks first. One hint for what is important: Do the tasks you avoid most.

- Block chunks of time for uninterrupted work.

- Don‘t try to do too many tasks on one day. Don‘t overschedule.

It does not matter which tools you use. Emacs+Orgmode, Things3, OmniFocus (my fav), TaskPaper, etc. Just choose one tool and stick with it. Don‘t think the grass is greener on the other side. Don‘t switch systems constantly when your current system seems overwhelming. It will be overwhelming when you didn’t keep it current. Just review and reorg your system regularly and keep it alive.

Edit: Forgot the most important principle: Don’t think that you can accomplish all the things that are on your lists. In life you are constantly forced to decide what to pick up and what to give up. Constant trade-offs. Never think that all the things on your lists should be done either. The hardest part is to realize that on a meta level you can change structures that create tasks that shouldn’t be done at all, at least not by you. This meta analysis is the hardest part. Looking at all the commitments you silently make, the roles you accepted silently now generating tons of work you shouldn’t be doing.

> One hint for what is important: Do the tasks you avoid most

There's a recently re-posted link to PG's Procrastination article[1], which argues against this:

> That's the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. They're type-C procrastinators: they put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff.

It all boils down as to why you avoid those tasks. Is it because you don't care about them, or because you dread their difficulty? If it's the former, maybe (it depends!) you can keep putting them off.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

I've just been working on this with my add coach, the challenge is to be objective. I had some tasks pop up amd I wanted to take them on rather than work the thing I'd been putting off. But to work on the motivation for tasks I think about the payoffs for completion and why they are important and realized the thing I was putting off in this case (retrofitting a yucky code base with a slick mew interface, but not fixing any debt) was actually less important than the popup which had a short timeline and high visibility with a customer. So "do what you don't want to" doesn't always work, and there is no substitute for thinking it through.

To-do lists are useful to an extent, but I’ve found making things time-bound to be the way to go. I wrote an article about this a couple of years back and I’m still using this approach with slight modifications along with a weekly planning session on Sundays: https://www.lostbookofsales.com/why-to-do-lists-often-stink-...

You’re right: We have limited time. Is a calendar necessary to consider that?

The way I see a calendar is for events that must happen at a specific time (appointments, birthdays, classes, etc.). To-dos may happen at any time. For example, I workout after lunch. But I don’t always eat lunch at the same time for the same duration. My workout may happen at 1pm or 3pm. Why do I need to schedule it at a fixed time?

Instead of scheduling todos, we could just timeblock them, and only allot N hours per day to tasks.

Absolutely, I work with blocks that only vaguely direct me with working on things I need to. With iOS calendar on Mac and phone it’s also easy to flip things around as you go.

I just have an X amount of time in my week outside of my varying weekly study schedule so I plug things in and allocate with a lot of buffers in-between to not be too tight.

It’s important to not be too harsh on yourself if you didn’t manage to do something. Just move it over to next week free block and re-adjust it on your next planning session on Sunday.

If it is something extra important with a deadline, mark it with a couple of exclamation marks. You can then at the end of week also review your progress with your longer-term goals. Voila! Works!

The problem with typical TODO lists is common to many productivity apps: one size does not fit all. People with different interests, lifestyles, job functions, and organizational constraints will need radically different workflows and software to support those workflows.

For example, in my day job at a big tech company, I am often blocked from doing some TODO item because I'm waiting for someone else to do something (code review, ACL approval, respond to support ticket, etc). So I don't want my TODO app to show me items that are currently blocked. This constraint in my workflow is mostly just an artifact of the way big tech companies operate, not a universal feature of work. Other professionals doubtless face other constraints.

I have a theory that the solution to this problem is for professionals (not just software engineers!) to write their own productivity apps. With a good framework, it is easy to write quite useful mini-apps that reflect your specific needs - think a spreadsheet, but with much nicer, custom user interface. I built such a framework for my own needs, and I am slowly rolling it out to the world, check it out if you're interested: https://webwidgets.io/

I fully agree with your first two paragraphs.

> I have a theory that the solution to this problem is for professionals (not just software engineers!) to write their own productivity apps

I agree with this in theory -- I love tools, tooling, and composition-based frameworks to roll your own tools. And I enjoy what you've done so far, especially the spaced repetition character system, which reminds me of my days learning kanji.

For me, at least, the risks I foresee are (1) I would be on the hook for maintaining the app if something goes wrong, (2) I would have to spend a lot of work making it look nice enough that it wouldn't bug me, and (3) I don't know if it would be flexible enough to accommodate changes in my workflow in the future.

I would love to see, for example, a tutorial on how to roll you own to-do app in 10 minutes and deploy it.

I find them to be magic little time capsules, for when I write them and then find them six months to a year latter, they let me know what I have not gotten done yet...

Or, perhaps they remind you of what didn't need to be done after all...

I spent some time in Asia and one of the things that impressed me was the use of slippers/flipflops/thongs. Maybe it was just who I happened to be around but I ended up with one pair to walk outdoors arround the corner , another solid pair for all day outside, a pair for in the house, another for in my room, and another for in the bathroom/shower.

ToDo lists can be like that in that they work as a note to self on paper or as an unstructured text file, or as a metadata graph multi-linked procedure with calendar start/stop times.

What you need to do can also be embodied arround you in a memory palace type structure where something physical like putting on your shoes reminds you that you need to decided about that gym membership.

The point is there are many ways that work better or worse situationally and having a personalized workflow drawing from a range of methods applied through practice is better than locking onto any single definition.

“Get rid of your to-do list and instead choose one year goal, then break it down into monthly goals, then weekly goals, then daily goals”

And what do you call that list you just wrote down, exactly?

OKRs. Obviously.

One single fractal to-do.

The most useful aspect of my to-do list system is that one of my monitors acts as a bit of a dashboard where my events in my calendar and items from my to-do list are written to the current wallpaper using Imagemagick. (Along with a five day weather forecast, my children's school time-tables and a bit of other stuff.)

This way, the info is always visible (when I'm not using that monitor for anything else) so easy to look at at a glance.

One of my to-do lists is simply a text file in Dropbox (so I can also edit it from my phone when not at home). I can also open it fast with a simple key-press on my computer. It tends to be the spot where, as soon as I think of something I have to do, I'll open that file, write a line for it and save it. Then I know it is out of my head and I don't have to worry about trying to remember it any more.

The other to-do list I use is Tracks[0] running in a Docker container. This is used for more organised to-dos and particularly things that I have to do at a future date (currently my must far-flung to-do is for 2026). Things that are to be done down the track I'll also add a show-from date to (either on the day or a little before) so they they're not visible on the main page. I don't need to see them, and doing so only wastes brain cycles when reviewing the current list.

Items in either a particular category, or are visible with a due date get merged in with the calendar for the next seven days and display with their own high-lighting on my wallpaper/dashboard.

Been using this more-or-less for quite a few years now and feel it works quite well. I do have grandiose thoughts of moving to using Taskwarrior as I do have the occasional Trello board or Jira project I wouldn't mind integrating into a holistic miasma, but I would still like a good web interface similar to Tracks to visualise and triage. Could not find something I was comfortable with last I looked.

[0] https://www.getontracks.org/

What do you have to do in 2026?

I have passport renewal dates in my todo list further out than that.

I actually use 4 different todo apps, and a paper notebook. The medium is the message, and the tool is the workflow. Different tools enable different kinds of thinking. Also if you have an ever-growing mountain of tasks, you're doing it wrong.

1. For "technical" thinking, fleshing out precise ideas that aren't fully formed yet, I find hierarchical outliner tools like Roam, Workflowy, and OmniOutliner enable deeper, more precise thinking that just doesn't happen with plain text. Currently prefer Omni for its native macOS experience. Good tools generate thoughts I previously didn't have.

2. For "creative" random thinking and my diary, nothing beats pen and paper, or plain text journaling. The key here is to use a tool which is inherently tied to a calendar (such as NotePlan/Agenda on Mac or a dated notepad). Beats a simple plain piece of paper or generic tools like Apple Notes / Google Keep, by moving the thoughts out of the mind once the date has passed. These tools help to "let go" of thoughts, not keep them.

3. For "habits", i.e. daily/weekly recurring tasks, I use Todoist, for its fantastic handling of recurring/overdue status and easy postponing/rescheduling. No other todo app I've tried "gets" recurring/overdue tasks as well as Todoist does. With Todoist I don't have an ever-growing mountain of tasks, just my daily habits. Whenever I'm bored or feeling down, I've made a habit of checking Todoist, and doing small mundane tasks helps to get the brain back in gear again, by doing the dishes or laundry or bank transaction clearing.

4. For "collaborative" unstructured work and one-time reminders, nothing beats email. Inbox-zero philosophy treats your inbox like a queue. The addiction to checking your email inbox and keeping it a 0 can be harnessed for great good. Email can also be used like a CMS, to follow up on people, with the right tools.

The key is to build a habit with each of these tools, perhaps even an addiction. Once a habit is built, it's hard NOT to do it, and easy to come back to after a vacation or sickness.

I've used a dozen of todo apps over the last 10 years. This is the best I found: https://tasks.org/

It allows you to snooze recurring tasks (unlike Google Keep), can hide a task from the list until its time comes, and a lot more!

And it's free. But not available for iPhone and this prevents me from switching to iPhone.

I’m the only one on my team that uses a todo manager religiously. I am also the most productive on my team.

I consider my todo manager my superpower. It powers my life.

And while I advocate using a good todo manager, I’ve learnt that they are not for everyone.

Everyone has their own working styles.

My recommendation for people is be open to experimenting with new ways to work.

If you have always used a calendar as your primary way to schedule your work or only a paper notebook, experiment for 15 days with another method.

If your todo manager isn’t working for you, experiment with another software or even try a paper notebook.

Investing a bit of time into alternative organizational methods can have a very positive impact on your productivity as well as happiness.

Todo lists are the only way i can get things done. In school, I remember a physics prof freshman year going in depth in how to solve problems. We had this super complex pulley system, and the first step was to label all the things, then to write out each of the balances of forces, and so on, until you’d described the whole thing. This super overwhelming problem became just a lot of simple stuff once you broke it down enough.

It’s the same with anything. If a problem is overwhelming, breaking it into smaller pieces until it’s not overwhelming is the only fix for procrastination I’ve ever found. A.k.a. the todo list.

Knuth’s advice is especially good. If there is something in my todo list that I hate, it’s probably because (a) it’s hard, (b) it will take some time to do, and (c) it’s very important (or else it wouldn’t be there). Mustering the courage to do them early rather than late is an almost certain recipe for satisfaction and a good, relaxing weekend. One other thing about todo lists that I like is fitting things into the available time frame. I often open my todo list and think “ok, I have 30 minutes, what can I tick off”. It’s quite good for my mental health (when I actually do it).

He wrote an entire text processing system as a way of procrastination, though.

Worse, he wrote an entire font design system as a way of procrastination during the aforementioned procrastination (therefore, Metafont ought to be called MetaProcrastinate).

Maybe because I am older, I am also creating check lists. I have check lists for a lot of repeated activities in my life. For example:

    - I go skiing every week, I have one day, one evening, one 
      week ski check lists for my equipment.
    - Outdoor activities.
    - Planning of my work day.

They are not the traditional TODO lists (I am also actively using these lists too) but they really help me getting things done by reducing the cognitive load of my regular activities. If one day a list fails me, then I update it for the next time.

I would highly recommend the book, "The Checklist Manifesto" by Atul Gawande. It is written primarily from the perspective of Medicine however, it shows how checklists of different kinds are being used to revolutionize many industries.

Two tips:

A major cost for long lists (which is most honest todo lists) is reviewing the items to see what needs doing and reprioritizing today. It's highly distracting (thinking about lots of things you aren't going to address today), draining, and highly inefficient (again, you spend time and energy for nothing - you aren't going to act on most items).

1. Use a hierarchical todo list, an outline, essentially. Then you can skip entire sections ('paint garage' - not this week!).

2. For each entry, add a 'review-by' date. It means that you can forget about the entry until that date. Set the dates realistically - you have only so much time and energy, so don't bother dating the tasks before you realistially might have time for them (e.g., after the big project). To review your list, just sort by the review-by date and read the items dated today. If you do it realistically, that shouldn't be much more than what's possible today, and you can safely and comfortably forget the rest, knowing they won't slip through the cracks.

Org mode -- you can expand and collapse with 1 key stroke

An alternative to using Emacs is EasyOrg [1] which makes org mode a dash simpler to use and with a useful agenda and calendar view. Not supporting full org mode, but plenty of power for Todo list and project planning.

[1] https://easyorgmode.com

While I greatly admire Emacs (which I've used) and Org mode (which always on my list of possibilities; it just doesn't suit current needs), lots of outliners can expand and collapse with a keystroke. That's not what makes Org special.

Call me kiddish then because I love opening up main.org and going thru all the TODOs and tabbing them open and closed periodically. What is the special sauce?

I agree with your point, the issue becomes that while you want to write everything down so you don't forget it, if that item is months away from being relevant, you have a large cost of having to read/see it constantly and figure out it's not important, multiple this by a large amount of tasks and it soon becomes overwhelming.

The method I try to use, is am feeling a weekly review where I review everything and check in with myself to see how I am feeling, what i got done and if i am on track, from there I can choose the things that are relevant to this week and ignore all the other tasks.

So when it comes to managing things on a day to day basis, my brain only has to deal with stuff coming up this week, safe in the knowledge that I have taken the time to think through everything else.

> 1. Use a hierarchical todo list, an outline, essentially. Then you can skip entire sections ('paint garage' - not this week!).

I use org mode; skip and/or fold/unfold entire sections/subsections at a time. Very useful for having an outline, hit 'TAB' on an item to expand, hit 'TAB' twice to expand all subsections, hit 'TAB' three times to fold everything again.

Use 'ALT' and up-arrow/down-arrow to move items up down the hierarchy. Very simple to use and remember.

I have to-do lists and notes and musings and sketches going back 45 years. Some in physical notebooks, many captured digitally. Slowly scanning, photographing and capturing the physical media to get it digitally archived. To-do lists get the thoughts out of my head and somewhere concrete so they aren't plaguing my other thoughts. I am not as successful as any of the people mentioned in the article, but I think the to-do lists and notebooks I've kept have done alright by me. There isn't a day in the past 45 years, much like writing code, where I haven't captured something in my notebooks, every day, from the mundane (pick up dry cleaning) to the absurd (create inflatable dart board for real darts).

What I have found that works best, for my situation, is to not get too organized with the notes and to-do lists. It helps having the notes searchable, hence the desire to get every note, sketch and to-do item captured digitally, eventually.

Cal Newport and Shane Parrish, in a discussion on the Knowledge Project podcast, talked unfavorably about to-do lists. They favored scheduling time to perform the needed tasks in a daily calendar.

I tried that calendaring system a few times. It did not work for me. To-do lists are easy, comfortable, familiar. They may not work for millionaires. They work for me.

Setting times is fine, but my approach is I have a list of 4-5 things to do written the night before, and knowing how much time I have in the morning, midday and afternoon as well as the energy I still have left at different parts of the day I say whether they’re done before work, at lunch, or after work.

I’m really not sure on the distinction people are using between to-do lists and these other approaches - they all seem like to-do lists just formatted differently because people work differently.

I've gotten a lot of productivity out of todo lists.

I've tried Cal Newport's calendaring system as well, which is more or less a bullet journal + timeline and I thought it was somewhat helpful, but in the end it was too tedious.

The thing that doesn't work for me is that If I don't finish something within a timeframe, its not worth context switching. Other times it made no sense to take on a task at a specific time.

Sometimes its just better to have a simple list and wing the rest of it. Don't overcomplicate your life if you don't have to.

It's intreasting in taking on new responsibilities I heard Cal talk about how this system wasn't working for him and he had infact switched to Trello for this.

So while he does still use this system, it shows that the system breaks if your work doesn't fit being scheduled that way.

All in all, the take away really is that a lot of generic productivity advice, is bad if it gets really specific about the tool, because you have to find what works for you personally and for the type of work you have and i think sometimes even that is different tools at different times.

OP here. I agree, and I hope your take-away from my post is that extremely successful people do use to-do lists. To quote myself, "People are different enough that there is no universal system." What works for you is what works for you, and you should use it unabashedly.

I think it's safe to ignore any advice that sounds like "successful people do/don't do ..."

Advice like that will always contradict itself since successful people are not all the same.

I find them invaluable when programming, before the program is complete enough to have a formal issue tracker. There are always a lot of pending obligations and incomplete ideas that I have to record so I don't forget them. I also like the rhythm of completing stuff and deleting them from the list. The list is just a text file that I keep in source control along with the code, so I can retrieve old versions if I have to. Thus I don't worry about deleting items once they are completed or stop being relevant.

For real-life stuff the usual wisdom applies. Plenty of stuff on the list never gets done and that is fine. It's just a place to park pending stuff.

I use an org file these days but a plain text file was fine before I switched to org. An app would be ridiculous, in my opinion.

I started using a tool called Obsidian and making tasks for myself in todo list form interspaced into daily notes, it has worked so far for the last few months and I am able to prioritize better.

One particular incantation of this is I had something complex I wanted to create with a lot of dependencies and steps. I created a kanban style ticket board for myself and was very successful, essentially distilling todo lists into a scoped ticket, via obsidian. I was honestly a little blown away by the whole thing.

Basically the whole thing is integrated into Obsidian as plugins that I fold into my daily calendar and routine. Take notes in meetings or anytime I think of something, and in the middle of notes add a checkbox which gets populated on a master to do list tied to my calendar.

To do lists are part of a larger system that has made me a hundred times more productive.

For me, yes, it’s about remembering what I need to do in a given day, and holding myself accountable to getting it done. Mapping out goals and the many steps to get there gives me perspective on what it will actually take to achieve goals rather than losing momentum.

The one caution I’ll give is that for me, I’m also a somewhat obsessive organizer and someone who likes to tinker with my system. That’s a rabbit hole I’ve ended up going down and it can slow you down. I’m able to avoid doing that but I need to be mindful of it and commit to my plans and my system, revisiting it only at preset intervals.

I have a notebook; sometimes it gets a to-do list so i can forget about things I have to do, sometimes it's a design sketchbook, and sometimes is for doing a bit of math.

That some rich or smart people have/had Todo lists sounds like survivorship bias

For those of us who use to-do lists, where do you keep them?

My experiences:

- Colornote, the best i have found. You can have a to-do list without any distraction. Click and it’s crossed over, click again and its unchecked again. Only android, no sync, both are problems.

- Todoist, has some misguided notion that i want my to-do to have anything to do with a calendar. When you open the app, fist task is always to close the calendar, and go to the todo list. Will either delete or reorder checked tasks, annoying. Will auto-calendar items if you write something like ”Something today”, ARGGHH. But, it will work anywhere, and sync everything across devices, so my current choice.

OP here. Here were my needs:

- I need to get into the habit of using it every day.

- I need to like using it. For me, a lack of friction is vital.

- I need something flexible enough for me to add extra detail if I need it (e.g. notes) or change my workflow as my situation changes.

I found that a plain text file works very well for me. I always have my terminal open, editing a file is quick, and I can store notes with tasks easily. I don't need my list to look beautiful -- I just need to be able to pull it up no matter where I am.

Specifically, I'm using the system Jeff Huang describes here: https://jeffhuang.com/productivity_text_file/

[edit]: And going up one step, there's the meta-issue that there are, what, hundreds of to-do apps to choose from? Frankly, I found myself paralyzed by options.

In my document management system. I've built a bastardized gemtext/orgmode parser because other people's software and servers keeps updating and breaking and I want to be able to access and update it from any device or location.

https://memex.marginalia.nu/todo/todo.gmi

https://memex.marginalia.nu/todo/done.gmi

On paper, with a pencil.

I've got a notebook that fits in my back pocket

I'm not sure what you're talking about. I've been using Todoist since 2013 and have never encountered a calendar open on app startup. To be honest, I'm not sure I could get a pure calendar view if I tried.

In settings you can change the default view to any project or filter if you want that.

You can also disable smart date recognition (switch that says 'smart date recognition' in the general section of settings).

Checked tasks aren't deleted. They are collapsed by default, but you can choose to show them (under three dot menu). You can also set up recurring tasks if you want something to be checked off every day.

Well, this perhaps goes into my preferences more than can be expected from a generic app, but:

- I mean the scheduling feature as a whole is something i do not use. I would prefer to disable it alltogether. Views menus and all.

- I would prefer the app to display a list of list, so i can go to a to-do directly with one click.

- It seems i can disable the auto calendar feature, great :)

- I would prefer the behaviour of checking an item to be: The checkbox becomes checked. Nothing else. I usually manually order the lists the way i want. Any automated hiding or reordering is annoying.

You may like https://quire.io - I use it for non-time sensitive tasks and todoist for things that need to be done on/by a specific date.

I direct five bands across 8 grades and deal with a lot of events off-site. I’ve got parent contacts to make about logistics, supplies to manage for the band, instruments to help students fixed, resources for helping students I want to make…

Many, many band directors don’t use to-do systems, but I don’t know how (nothing about the number of bands I have is necessarily uncommon). OmniFocus and an overly complicated system of several note apps make me able to reference the information I need at any given moment on whatever device is in my hand, and keeps me on top of what I need to do.

I have worked in several organisations where I have needed to be dynamic, dropping some tasks I am currently working on to take up something that is more business critical. I create a task list to keep track of anything that needs to be done, some tasks may have several sub-tasks. I add notes for each task, to remind myself of where I was in each task before I leave it to move on to something else (or before I forget). As each task or sub-task gets it gets set as finished removed / a strike through (depends on the tool being used for the list).

The list is only to remind me of what needs to be done, I will often change the order of the list depending on the changing priorities of the business I am working in. I found I need a list as trying to juggle all the tasks in my queue became too difficult and often would require some time to rediscover where I had finished off on a task before I was asked to change to something of higher priority (e.g. migrating a machine to a different version on Linux where a predecessor has not documented the build, compared to an outage on a service in production (sometimes diagnosing an issue in an outage generates tasks to be done on other machines to prevent future issues, the notes will record the relevant commands etc that will need to be run when performing that task).

I will add that I would not live my life based on the the task list, it is merly a tool to aid me as my brain gets focused on other things :D

One thing I’ve found necessary about a todo list is to have it synced to the phone (which I’ll have with me nearly always, as opposed to the laptop), so I can quickly note down a thought that I might otherwise forget by the time I open the laptop next. Other than that, a simple checklist has proved the most useful setup. I’ve tried fancier tools like Trello, Todoist, Evernote but none of them took. I keep my checklist sorted roughly in order of urgency, and always refer to it when trying to decide what to do next.

To-do lists didn't work for me for a while, but I eventually figured out the secret for me. I kept dropping off on my usage, forgetting to write down my to-do's. They usually only worked when I was feeling motivated/inspired, not on a daily basis.

I found that the secret for me was To-do's in a spiral bound notebook, so that my list was always staring me in the face and begging to be added to / crossed off. The physical act of writing and crossing off helps tremendously.

My "to-do" list is a Freemind (and soon-to-be Freeplane) mind map. It's my calendar, my to-do-list, my project planner, my external brain. When I need to write something down, it goes to the mind map or a piece of paper where that information will go later to the mind map.

What about those things that never seem to come off the mind map? If it stays on the map too long without completion, I realize it's something I'm never going to do and I simply delete it. I never look back.

Me. A lot. For my tech work, I keep a simple text document with a long-running list (1 year now) of items to do. When I get them done, I mark them with an X and add a line of what I did, or, if I didn’t do it (it becomes OBE, too old, or it was otherwise handled, etc.), then I also mark it with a X and make a note. I don’t delete items because I can always search my list for those things and have an answer for that item.

Surgeons in ORs have checklists.

Jira and Rally are essentially fancy TODOs.

I think To-Do lists have limited usefulness.

For very specific predetermined tasks, they are of course useful. Like recipes, grocery lists, or doing taxes.

However outside of that, it’s ridiculous to use To-Do lists when better tools are available. Calendar for date sensitive events, OKRs for goals, GitHub issues for engineering, etc.

The mind is also super good at prioritization and determined what’s next. And it’s a better guide to guide your life instead of giant To-Do lists of things you wish to do.

Todo lists are tools, like a hammer. Hammers can be used to end life, but also to build houses. The tool is rarely good or bad in itself, but either suitable or unsuitable to do a certain job.

In my experience, todo lists are suitable for keeping you focused on a set of tasks. However, they seem not so good are being a complete system of task scheduling. Over time they often fill up and have no clearly defined mechanism of clearing not-so-relevant-anymore tasks.

Therefore, I create a new todo list every day. First, I write down what I think, that I will get done today. Second I take a look at yesterdays list and decide for every open task if I will get it done today or if it should go to the backlog or graveyard. As the final step I look at the backlog, but mostly decide to just go with the list I already have.

This procedure helps me to focus and get daily tasks done. What it doesn't support is prioritization. To accomplish that I tend to reflect every few weeks on what I should be doing more and what I should be doing less and changing my calendar accordingly.

So I use todo lists primarily for daily focus, instead of expecting them to solve hard priority issues.

You need to keep track things somehow. And I can't think of a single piece of software or other elaborate method of project management that doesn't essentially boil down to "Thing X needs to get done"

I use todoist:

-About 60% are a bunch of ideas, a sort of wish list, that I occasionally read through to keep them in mind and in case something I thought of a while back is now much more relevant.

-At least 20% of what's on there are higher value projects I should work on when I have time.

-The last 20% are a regular stream of tasks coming in and out. When none of them are due "right now" then I work on something form the previous 20% (where values of "right now" are in the 2-3 days range and I'm absolutely certain that the soonest needed tasks will not take longer than that.

And then sometimes when I just need a break from normal work I will take a day or two & find something from the 60% to work on.

This also serves as a worklog so I can easily track what I've done-- especially useful for performance evaluations.

I function almost exclusively on letter-size pads of lined paper. Each pad will cover a different area of my work, and the number of pads will range from two to eight depending on how many balls I have in the air. I'll write each TODO item down on the top sheet of a pad, put a check next to the item when it's done, and cross it out when I've confirmed it. Every once in a while I'll tear off the top (scratched-out and scribbled) sheet and rewrite the remaining items. Or, if I'm setting that task aside, I'll enter any undone items into a long-term file (e.g. a bug database, or an Omni Outliner TODO list), tear off and chuck the top page, and put the blank (but reduced) pad back in my supplies drawer.

Having to physically write out items feels essential to my thought process. Having to translate thoughts to the motion of pen on paper helps me remember and digest those thoughts. And, handling the pads works for me as a metaphor for juggling projects.

"To Do" lists are useful, and responsible people use them (or hire PAs that manage them for them).

Personally, I use a plain text file, ~/todo.txt (by design the only non-directory file in my ~/), in combination with an A5 paper notebook. For the online file, stuff that gets done gets moved from the beginning of the file (heading "To Do") to the end of the file (heading "Done"). A todo command helps quickly append an item to the file without opening the file. The paper notebook includes other notes than to do lists as well, and its to do lists are meant to eventually make it to the online list (if they don't get ticked off as "done" before).

EDIT: I forgot to mention that (1) for projects, I usually have separate per-project "To Do" lists, and (2) I use my online calendar to mark deadlines in it. The system works reasonably well, although the calendar could be better integrated.

How would you remember all this in life without todo lists? I have a list full of tasks for upkeep on my living space, cooking, work, side projects, family. So many of what I call administrative tasks - mail a check, file car registration, on and on. You can’t just do everything the minute it comes up, although I think that’s a good goal.

I use ClickUp as an overarching todo list combined with various automations based on email which I can trigger by applying specific labels or which are automatically triggered by filters and picked up by integromat.

This then either delegates tasks to my assistant or team; triggers onward automations to carry out important but repetitive tasks; or adds them to my own list - the latter often being “thing about this” rather than “do this”. I’ve also setup Otter to save things to my Dropbox so that I can dictate things into my todo list.

For example the tag “investigate” can be triggered with a keystroke on my email and copies the email into a particular list and assigns it to my assistant. When the task is “accepted” that applies a template that then sets a due date and pushes it into our weekly one on one agenda. “Action required” pushes it into my task list and sets a high priority flag.

Emails with attachments that hit a particular filter (e.g. regularly occurring reports that I receive by email) are labelled, the attachment is extracted and saved to a folder in Google drive where it is picked up and emailed to a kindle I use specifically for reading work documents, and a ClickUp task is created that prompts me to read it within X days then and write myself a brief summary as an aide memoire, but which is also available to my team where necessary so that the key points I consider important are crystallised, either for further action or just to build the bigger picture.

I’ve gradually managed to slim the bulk of my work admin down to email, ClickUp and calendar which frees up a huge amount of time - and more importantly removes the crippling stress of feeling like I’ve forgotten something.

I have severe ADHD so if I don’t use lists I forget things. And when I get stressed about maybe having forgotten something my creativity and higher focus evaporates.

Super-powered todo lists are my secret weapon and have changed the way I work in an incredible way.

I've been running the same todo list system for almost twenty years now. It's basically David Allen's Getting Things Done, with the usual tweaks and adjustments that accumulate over time as you actually use it. Since I stopped using a Palm Pilot, my next stop was OmniFocus and that's where I still am.

The biggest problems that I've seen people have with todo lists is 1) not getting in the habit of trusting them, and 2) not re-evaluating their commitments instead of treating everything on them as etched in stone as soon as it's recorded. I regularly look at my lists and go, "That? Yeah, that's not happening." I also have extensive "Now now" files (used to be Someday/Maybe), and at this point they've evolved into a half dozen different files for categories of not nows.

My personal favorite is Cal Newport's idea of keeping a list of things you need todo and time blocking them into whatever schedule you have.

e.g. keep a "todo" list of some kind (or write down everything you remember) and block off specific time to work on each thing. This 1) forces you to pick some things to prioritize 2) gives you time to make progress on them 3) doesn't drop the ball on if that thing was "done" because it's still on the other list.

During the day you just focus on your calendar and what is next.

The biggest way todo lists have never worked for me is they make everything feel overwhelming. This method helps force me to pick and make progress. I don't always follow it closely because at the end of the day it's just a way to trick your self to prioritize given how much time you have in the day.

When I write stuff down on to-do lists I never forget things on the list. I don't look at the list and check them off after I do them. It doesn't help me get anything done. The items I don't do are memorized on the phone and in my mind, and I still don't do them.

I guess I keep putting stuff in the to-do list on the fear I might forget to do something important, but probably I wouldn't check the to-do list enough to prevent that anyway.

I think the to-do list is probably best if you model yourself as the slave of its author, and you dutifully obey your master. Where the to-do list represents some kind of self-mastery, executive function, command of present self from past. Also liberates you from decision-making in the present.

I don't have that attitude toward to-do lists at all.

I have ADHD, I have to use todo lists to get anything done

Indeed, starting medication today, I just paid for my Todoist yearly plan. Wish me luck!

Medication helped me a lot when I stopped thinking of it as a panacea. Best of luck!

I do. They serve me, not master me. Ad hoc. Some last a long time, some are transient. Often helpful if I momentarily accumulate a lot of TODOs, or brainstorming some, and the act of typing them out, and seeing on screen, helps me remember them and prioritize.

Key is make it more of a win than lose. Thus I bias to plain text. Either in a notepad type app on mobile, or in vim on Mac or Linux. Sometimes in a plain paper notebook with a ballpoint ink pen -- helpful if I want to sketch out some UI mockup, or, a rough 1st stab at a diagram-amenable concept, like software architecture.

I feel the problem space has been fairly solved for decades if not centuries. But use what works best for you.

OP here. I think this is completely correct. And I ended up using the same system as you -- plain text in Vim. For me, it's super low-friction and I see it all the time, so it's easy to make it habitual.

agreed. and in vim's case I love having one tool I can use on a local machine, or over ssh to a remote server. one tool for coding, tech docs, notes, book writing etc. and its free and its open etc

In most cases, the productivity tool is about the habit, not the specific tool. If a text-file todo list doesn't work for you, try something else. However at the end of the day its the habit, not the tool that is the most important thing.

I am completely dysfunctional without todo lists and a daily reflection and revisiting of priorities.

I will constantly find other things to do I would prefer to do in the moment, but will ultimately lead to important things being neglected for days or years.

Productivity discussions sometimes baffle me. It feels like some people expect a TODO list (or other productivity tools) to put magical motivations into their heads. When it doesn't, they declare it not useful.

A TODO list is just a list. It mainly helps with two problems: 1) memory problem, 2) planning problem. It can also facilitate making measurements and analysis if that's your thing. But regardless of which app or pen and paper you use, it is not capable of making you want to work.

Perhaps in the distant future, we'll have that magic bullets which instill literal productivity into your skull, but in 2022, your motivation is on you.

In the digital world one mistake I found myself doing a couple times was that I found a great new Todo list tool, started using it, and in my enthusiasm for the new tool and my potential future with it I added a bunch of useless todo items.

And after a month or so it was disused. After a year I'd find it and feel slight shame.

But this last iteration of todo list usage might be different, hopefully. It came during a stressful time. I am good at managing stress though so all I needed was a way to remember what people wanted from me. And that's where the todo list came in.

So far so good, I'm 2 months in, the longest I've ever used a todo list.

+1 (I am Sisyphus!)

I like how the counterpoints for to-do lists are things that can be fixed by process. Reviewing list often, closing things you won't do, grouping by importance, categorizing by context, etc.

The one recurring alternative presented to to-dos seems to be scheduling (ironic given that a counter argument of to-do lists is that its hard to estimate time). Schedule rather than to-do seems applicable to such a narrow band of people whose life is deterministic. The overhead of rescheduling everything that I can't do when the alert pops would be ridiculous.

I understand that they might not work for some, they do just fine for me.

I think Todo lists come in many forms. Im surrounded by them in my daily life without even realizing they are Todo lists. Off the top of my head - Email - Jira - Messaging Comms - Notepads - Todoist - notes - text editor

I noticed that it's better to keep something in mind when I intend to do that actually, and add it to a list when I don't work on it.

Later I learned that this has a name: Zeigarnik Effect.

I usually write down not to do, but to forget. It's like bookmarking a site to visit later. Time to time, I really revisit but most of the times, todo lists are more effective as "won't do lists." When I was younger I was feeling guilt not completing every item in my list, but now I just declare bankruptcy and reboot.

If it's super important, I use calendar to reserve some real time.

My current assortment of lists look like this:

Job-check monthly

Job-check weekly

private-check monthly

private-check weekly

Monday / Tuesday / (...) (weekday lists)

Monthly lists get checked at the beginning of the month, weekly lists at the beginning of the week. I move tasks to the individual days and delete or move items at the end of the day. I tried many systems so far, and I like to focus on a few things during the day. This is a system that currently works, but it will likely be replaced at some point.

Team tasks are another matter, they live in shared tools at work. Keeping both systems in synch is often a challenge, and I need to restart it after a few days.

Sounds like a habit tracker would be a good tool for this.

I use Productive but I hesitate to recommend it because of how aggressively it tries to get you to convert to paid version.

not quite, the most important part of my todo list checking is manually moving items to the current days' list. This action is easily done in tick tick by drag and drop, but I feel like I have to do it manually, to create a memory impression strong enough that I remember the task as something important. The whole todo list 'system' is just an artefact of repeated actions that have a higher chance to create helpful memory paths.

>> Find a time-tested system that you can make into a habit. If it becomes a poor fit for your situation, change it.

This is the correct answer to pretty much everything related to organizing your life.

I barely scratched the surface of what org mode can do, but tree structured todos were a game changer for me. When programming, researching a problem, being forced to go down a rabbit hole it helped me go as deep as necessary into a task without loosing track of what I actually want to achieve.

I wish there was a great hierarchical todo manager for native Mac, with the capability to paste images. Right now I use taskpaper, which lacks image functions. I tried notion, but its editing capabilities are really slow.

Omni Outliner, Nirvana, Things, maybe Omni Focus, Evernote

I have the simplest and most basic todo list that I could make without using any external tools except for the ones that I already use: I send myself an email with the header 'TODO' and reply to it whenever something changes. It also serves as a record when stuff gets removed (the mail following the one where it was last present was when it was done), though that is rarely used. For repetitive items (tax filings, for instance) I change the 'due' date.

Simple, easy, very flexible.

I’m using them more and more, especially as life got busier with little ones. Best one is shopping list, arranged in a way how you navigate the shop - veges, fruit, meat, pantry, diary, bakery, etc. Others include - beach day, day out, day on the water, trip plan, birth plan, long term plans (get passport, sell this, buy that, service car, etc).

Just the fact that you write these things down over time frame of couple days is planing 101.

Al of this is pretty easy with Notes.app + sharing with partner.

I use the personal assistant of my smartphone to fill-in (by talking) my Reminders app with tasks to do, ideas I suddenly have, and what to buy at the grocery store.

And, as much as I can, I try to give date+time to most of the tasks.

Honestly this has changed my life.

No paper. No pencil. No typing. And no more listing things constantly in my head. Everything is cleanly organized in my "second brain". Plus I can add things on the fly while driving, walking or being busy.

What I current wonder about is the lack of proper integration between the calendar, reminders & notes apps. The more I use them (separately, unfortunately), the more I think they should be different facets of the same app. And they should share the same database (for ex, a "Idea" reminder could be also a Note, and could also be added to my calendar).

This. If I can't meet a reminder when it's due, I set a new reminder that instant for the next available time. This has made me a bullet proof meeting handler, someone that 'remembers everything'. The only problem with iPhone is that reminders don't make noise if there is already an active reminder, so you have to get rid of them as they arrive.

I’ve tried to use to do lists and it has never worked for me. The necessary upkeep to keep it up to date annoyed me the most.

Recently, however, I’ve come to realise the value of having a well-groomed todo list, with tasks broken down and prioritised. E.g. not “work on my game” but rather “Find 10 inspirations for the games art direction (20m)”.

This gets rid of any ambiguities I have around the task, which has been a friction large enough for me to procrastinate.

I have gone through various tools in the context of a developer, designer, and business person. Right now, I’m comfortable with a pattern and has been OK with the outcome. It is a combination of pen/paper, and digital tools. And yes, I have used Things, Clear, ToDoist, Remember the Milk, that weekly timeline-ish thing, and what not.

Here is my personal way of doing it.

I use the OS built-in Calendar at the base (macOS Calendar in my case). We have the usual family calendar (shared with my wife), then the kids calendar for schools, and stuffs, and eventually my personal and work calendar.

I try to be flexible and move the to-do items in the calendar around or schedule it for specific dates across the months, or the year.

## Morning

I earmarked my own personal time of about 3 hours (6-9AM-ish) for breakfast (for the family + school preparations), exercise, reading/writing, just thinking or doing nothing or play/cycle with the kids.

I also list all the to-do items in 15-min slots in the top of the calendar timeline till about 10AM. That way, it prevents people from booking my slots, while it serves as a to-do with no specific schedule. These days, with people across timezones, this helps to block a Busy/Unavailable time.

Change macOS Calendar default duration to 15-min

`defaults write com.apple.iCal 'Default duration in minutes for new event' 15`

## Work

This is where work related and time-specific slots are scheduled, including meeting, etc.

I also tend to write-out one or two big things for the day/week in a Yellow Sticky and stick it right in the middle of the monitor covering the Apple Logo in my iMac (my current workstation). So, I see it every time without having to bring up calendar. :-)

If I have a specific step-by-step task to complete (usually broken down), I use a piece of paper lying around, or the fancy Japanese paper and then make a checklist manifesto out of it.

## Evenings

I try to leave it as blank as possible but meetings with huge timezone differences tends to pop-up and I’m OK with it.

I know this is may not work for most others. I’m always lazily looking for ways to learn, simplify, minify, and making it better. And yes, I also maintain a plain text file that is in the lines of "T0-D0 or NOT or Maybe".

I live most of my life via to do lists. I find it lets me put time into organizing my goals, then put the lists aside once I have a task to work on, and just focus on that task.

But I don't think we are all the same, so it is somewhat silly to worry about what I do, or what blog posts people write about it. Try things out, see what works for yourself, and do that.

I use my email inbox as my TODO list. It works great. I have also successfully managed large software teams using a simple prioritised TODO list in Excel. It also worked great. Think about it: if you always know what your priorities are, and you always work on what is highest priority, you pretty much can’t do better. It is an optimal algorithm.

I have a todo app that I wrote myself, every month I add things that I need to pay and other stuff that I need to do. I used to pay the bills all in advance, but here in Brazil leave money in some Fintech apps are giving quite the interest, so I hold on to the money until the day I have to pay the bill. The app has been very helpful so far...

Great question! Todo lists are next to useless for me. For important stuff that I have to do and must not forget about, I set up alarm clock (without description, as such stuff is in the back of my mind anyway). The rest is kept in text files, notebooks, napkins, etc., which I re-visit periodically or remember about spontaneously.

Here.

I've been reading a few books recently on various subjects, and it's really interesting that when you get various processes in unrelated fields, it all just boils down to:

    - write a TODO list
    - have a step to review and change course to correct

You name it - Agile, Customer Development, Marketing, Weight loss etc!

TODO Lists Work(tm)!

Nowadays, I keep my TODOs in the codebase, it's pretty easy to browse through code to find what isn't implemented yet, also it became really popular lately and a lot of plugins for better management appeared.

For real life TODOs, I use a simple cli to keep them in a database that I share via Google Drive with my phone.

MS TODO has been a decent entry in this space in terms of productivity at work where MS 365 is in use. Flagging an email gets it to appear in Todo and it has a useful "My Day" feature with suggestions for the day.

It felt like a natural next step after using emails as a Todo list as the post mentions.

One reason why I prefer the web version of Outlook is that you can select text in an email and get a context menu that adds that text to your TODO along with a link back to the original email.

For me, nearly all my new tasks come in via email and if I pass them on for someone else to resolve I will usually hear back via email too, so it makes 100% sense to have my todo list sitting next to my inbox. Drag and drop reordering, easy checkoff with saved history of completed tasks and near-seamless calendar integration make all this a no-brainer for me. I don't generally like MS products, but they got it right on this one.

ToDo lists are also spread on several machines’ `/root/TODO` as well as the main login workstation’s `$HOME/TODO`.

Then there is this wonderful “all-platform” Joplin note app hooked to my self-hosted ownCloud (via NextCloud option): it’s so awesome to access them however which device you use.

I use them but they are not the end all be all. You can't boil everything down to a todo list.

In terms of software I use the basic checklist on from iOS's Notes app.

I used to use Wunderlist app but then they got sold off to Microsoft (I think) so I stopped using it and never replaced it with anything fancy.

I find the act of writing out my day on a piece of paper a useful practice to get my mind in work mode and reduces mindless internet scrolling.

I imagine the concept of todo lists in general are similar, it is a ritual that puts the person in the proper frame of mind to spend their time.

I’ve struggled to successfully implement todo lists because I always run up against a thing that I need to do but really don’t want to. Its usually something that involves interaction with someone, and pushes my anxiety.

Does anyone have a mental trick for overcoming this sort of thing?

Feels like what there needs to be is a meta-system to evaluate different productivity methods for X amount of weeks each and then compare their effectiveness. Knowing such a framework would be more useful than individual techniques, of which there are countless.

Every day before logging off from work, I write down my todos for the following work day on a blank piece of paper. I close my laptop, tuck the paper in a folder and put both in closet away from sight.

Has worked really well getting things done and disconnecting from work.

I need todo lists - paper is usually enough, and easier, more in-my-face than any app can be. A single sheet on my desk.

I have about 20 to 30 things to do at work on any given day, a to-do list saves me from falling down the rabbit-hole of a single task.

Todo lists are just a way to help you memorize what to do, it all is just a name. The system in the way to utilize a “todo list” is what matters and it’s just an art form that everyone needs to develop one to suit their own working conditions

Is email really comparable ? The todo examples quoted were self assigned tasks, emails are usually things you need to do for other people. I can get on board with the email task management, creating personal to-do lists is just not my style.

OP here. When I compare email to, for example, being an IC and using JIRA/Trello, there seems to be a natural analogy in that there's an inbox of items you have to respond to.

And more power to you for knowing what works for you and what doesn't. I found that to-do lists work for me, and I'm glad you know what works for you.

My guess is that everybody uses them when they have plenty to do.

I'm superbly disorganized all the time, but when I had clients, projects, deadlines or generally a lot of stuff to do that I wanted done, I wrote a to-do list.

My subconscious alerts me to “don’t forget about x” at some weird time and my todo list collates these so I can smash them out when its time (e.g. during business hours).

Also i have too much going on to avoid using a calendar.

If rich/famous/successful people don't use TO-DO lists is only because they've outsourced the intent of this simple tool to a team of people. I guarantee they use TO-DO lists.

Indeed! Paul Graham, Sam Altman, and a few others I list in my post all use todo lists.

[edit] Sorry, I misunderstood your comment. I agree, they might be outsourcing this to an admin of some kind.

I need to get back into them.

I am most productive when I start the day looking at yesterday's list and re-organizing it. By the end if I don't get too distracted I end up being more productive...

It is on my todo to create a todo list.

My father once went to the book store, to buy an agenda to write down things he forgot. When he came home, turns out he left the agenda at the bookstore :)

Everyone uses them. The only real difference is the medium. Hand written, electronic or your on-board biological memory system (not recommended).

Me. But they get way too long. Not enough hours to get through them all. So it's more like an attempt to prioritize.

I use a 5-3-1 todo strategy every day: 5 easy things, 3 medium things, 1 hard thing. I didn't invent it, but it works well for me.

Anything that didn't get done the day before gets escalated a category the next day. That thing I though of being as medium todo but didn't get done? It's obviously belonging in the 'hard' category.

One of my easy tasks is always 'make tomorrows list'. So, it's a perpetual motion machine.

I like that system.

I actively use my grocery shopping list, every other list is just a form of note taking I revisit once in a blue moon.

Stopped a long time ago. Rely on memory or if bigger and more time critical I stick in my diary.

If you can’t create the checklist, you don’t know the deliverable.

I write them, but rarely read them

I do. Sticky notes + ClickUp.

Ben Franklin. Also myself.

As the joke goes about capitalism: to-do lists are the worst form of productivity organization but for any other.

I always wanted to use it. But never found a perfect one! Recommend me please

I didn't answer this cleanly in the post, but I don't there is such a thing. The perfect todo list is the one you can get yourself in the habit of using every day. And that varies from person to person.

For me, that was a text file, and I link to my specific suggestions at the bottom. For others (such as Matt Might) it might be an app like OmniFocus. Or perhaps you like working out of your email inbox.

Follow the fundamental principle: what can you get yourself to actually use and stick with?

First off, totally a clickbait title as well as opening sentence. But once you read the article...

That said, everyone uses to do lists. One doesn't have to explicitly write it down or use some app to manage it, sometimes it's in your head. "Oh yea, I need to get bread. I'll add bread to the cart" or "I will take exit 358 to get to my destination" and so on.

It's a thing we all do. Just not everyone writes it down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com