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Comment by ozim | Hacker News Reader

I am just getting more and more convinced that any personal todo list is useless.

Most useless part is priorities on personal list. If something like utility invoice is to be paid - just do it.

If it is something like "read Anna Karenina" it is not getting any priority ever it is just something I would like to do in my life.

So stuff that really needs to be done I will deal with without any todo list I will just remember it or deal with it right away.

Stuff that does not need to be done will not get done - and that is perfectly fine.

Different thing is if it is company "todo" list and I need to keep customer requests, well JIRA does the job.

In the end don't listen to me because there are many much more successful people than me, I am simply happy with what I achieved so far, maybe I would achieve more with todo lists but somehow I fail to see how these would help me in living my life.

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> So stuff that really needs to be done I will deal with without any todo list I will just remember it or deal with it right away.

Just remember. That's exactly the thing I (for example) am not capable of. I keep forgetting everything. Every time I have some spare time, I am checking my todo first if there's something I need/want/can do.

Thanks for your point of view.

It is also why I am writing comments on the internet, to see what are other people life experiences.

My experience is that physical to-do lists are great for sitting down, surveying what needs doing, and deciding what you’re going to do today. Including decisions like “I did not read any of Anna Karenina yesterday but I still want to do this so I am putting it on today’s list, and while I am thinking about this I took 5s to take it off the shelf and put it by the comfy reading chair”. And things like “laundry is gonna eat 2h of my day today but I need some clean clothes ffs”. And “I have six important work projects and only 3h of actual productive time between meetings, I am going to work on projects X and Z today unless someone comes and screams about the other projects”.

Digital to-do lists are where tasks go to die.

I just keep on coming back to a nice notebook, a nice pen, and my variant of the Pomodoro method.

I used to do that too on paper, but at some point I ended up opening a text file in Emacs and do exactly what I would do on paper, just in Emacs. It's only a small chunk of text, so I don't use org-mode or anything like that.

But yeah, not accumulating stuff requires a conscious decision and the will to stick to it. The same goes for paper, though. I have a coworker that at some point had a stack of paper over 20 cm high.

> Digital to-do lists are where tasks go to die.

I also am becoming convinced of this.

The issue is that you can keep adding to them. And if you’re the digital hoarder type - hello, my friend Alex! - you can never delete the old crap. So now you have this utterly unachievable list of things that seemed like a good idea at the time. And which have lost context due to time, so now you barely even remember what you meant.

I introduced Alex to Things.app’s feature whereby you can mark a task as ‘Cancelled’. So it takes it off the list, but you’re not pretending that you did it. I hope that helps him.

Me, I use slips of paper and a pencil. On my desk the slips closest to me are those that I’m doing, or should do, now. When there’s too much paper, it’s obvious. Throwing away (by sticking it on the spike) a piece of paper feels good. It’s just a piece of paper.

I don't even try to follow by-the-book GTD anymore, but a lot of its principles speak strongly to me. In particular, the regular review cycle is critical. It feels great to have a process in place that explicitly grants me permission to delete/cancel the things I don't want or need to do anymore. As a result, I know that my todo list has only things on it that I actually care about.

> So stuff that really needs to be done I will deal with without any todo list I will just remember it

Well you're lucky then, because I frequently have to remind people of important things they (still) have to do and seem to have forgotten. Having such a list is a way to avoid the stressful situation of being late with things you can't postpone or which you benefit greatly from doing sooner rather than later.

For me it's useful to rid my mind from nagging thoughts. I might be working on something while suddenly thinking about something else to be done. If I'm not writing it, I'll lose focus. Writing it in a Todo list calms my mind and let me get back to whatever it is later, without worrying I'll forget about it. My mind wonders quite a bit, so this is very beneficial for me.

something to consider is that certain todo's require the right location or context, for example if I'm at the office and it occurs to me to pay the utility bill, that would go on a "home" todo list.

Additionally, some todo's have different timeframes than others. I try to think of things as short term/immediate, medium term/this week, and long term/nextweek-before I die.

I'll occasionally pick things of the long term list and cut them down into an action I could do immediate or this week, for example, get Anna karenina from the library.

> So stuff that really needs to be done I will deal with without any todo list I will just remember it or deal with it right away.

hopefully obvious note that that simply isn't an option for anyone with ADHD.

My problem is that I'll never remember to do those things on my own. I have repeating items for things that seem obvious but that life experience has demonstrated that I just can't track on my own. I wish I could remember to order flowers for my wife in time for them to be delivered before our anniversary, but I won't. A todo app for me is a lifesaver: instead of being all stressed out that I'm forgetting something important, I can get all that stuff out of my head and concentrate on other things.

Isn't a repeating calendar event with an alert a better tool for this? But then you have to remember to check your calendar or to do the thing that alert you just snoozed/ignored was reminding you to do. Don't forget to check your todo list from time to time...

I have the same problem as you, of remembering things I need to do. But I've not found todo lists to actually help, in fact I find if I take too much time to maintain the list, I have less time to spend doing the things I'm supposed to do.

Kind of like remembering phone numbers. I don't know anyone's phone number anymore, because I don't have to, because I have a place that I can store them all. The difference is that the phone dials it for me when I tap it; my todo list doesn't carry out the tasks I write on it, but it does help me to forget them faster!

It's some mixture of https://xkcd.com/1906/, https://xkcd.com/927/ and https://xkcd.com/1319/

I find a TODO list useful for those things that need to be done today as well as others sometime in the next two weeks. For whatever reason, it can't be done today but it does need to happen. Putting a reminder on my calendar sometimes works for me and sometimes doesn't depending on what other supporting actions or information or whatever go along with it. If the calendar reminder pops up and I'm not "ready" to work on that it can get lost. On my TODO list, I see a constant reminder that the due date is coming and I can ensure that I find the time to complete it. I'm not always the best at looking well ahead on my calendar.

That's how my mind works, YMMV.

Some of those repeats are more flexible, like "water my plant 10 days after I last watered it". It's not going to fall over and die if I miss a day or 2. That also lets me treat my calendar as sacred: if I have an appointment there, I have to be at that place and time. My dentist won't amused if I'm a day late.

I hate recommending specific apps, but after using OmniFocus for years, I started using Things a few months ago and it's been heavenly. It's not as powerful as OF, but has all the features I actually need and not much else. I'm not tempted to waste time making my workflow absolutely perfect and optimal instead of just, you know, doing things.

But are you then actually remembering her?

Yes, of course.

I have a completely different approach. My personal TODOs are of different type: they are necessary, non-immediate, with varying emotional load (pleasant-unpleasant). I manage them using a combination of calendar and at-based reminders. These include things like teeth cleaning, cancelling a subscription, calling my parents for their anniversary and so on. I simply wouldn't be able to remember all these things without reminders, there are just too many of them.

Normal human brain can’t remember that much. It also helps to write down everything that needs to get done first, so that you can prioritize between them.

Maybe I am just on the boring side of life and I don't really have that much to do.

My biggest problem earlier was that I thought I should have a todo list to achieve things in life. As it turns out it just does not matter, my connections, my starting point in life was much more defining to what I can achieve today than any form of organization of my self I would implement.

Of course unless I would be totally undisciplined and disorganized, but it turns out that I was disciplined and organized enough to reach good life and adding todo list is not something that would help me.

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> But aren’t you writing down a bunch of stuff that, really, honestly, you’re probably not going to do?

That's a separate problem, and a good reason to have periodic reviews. If you have big items that stay on your list for weeks you should consider removing them or make them more actionable than they currently are.

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