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Comment by itmag | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I'm very bitter/blasé toward any talk of todo systems, because the problem most often does not exist at that level.

The main thing for my productivity has been figuring out what I want and don't want in life. That's a big rabbit-hole; to do it properly you need multiple Phd's in psychology, it feels like sometimes. Much easier to just dick around with this or the other Getting-Widgets-Cranked app.

Once you know what you want and don't want, everything becomes much easier. Don't fall into the trap of procrastiplanning, is what I'm saying.

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You're completely right.

For the most part, it doesn't matter what tools you use if you (1) have developed discipline, and (2) have actually defined what you want to accomplish.

The key hill to climb, where most would-bes are going to fail is at this sentence: "READ THE DAILY LIST EVERY DAY once you sit in front of the computer".

To do that, you've first got to develop the will and desire to accomplish stuff -- and if you had that, you probably wouldn't be fiddling around with the todo-method-du-jour.

As a former member of the GTD and Seven Habits cults, I think the weekly list is more important than the daily list. If you are always heads down focused on your daily list, you will be stuck in fire-fighting mode. Weekly lists provide a chance to balance your personal priorities and see big picture opportunities when you start thinking beyond one day.

I agree about deciding what you do and do not want. I think a really simple, no-frills system can actually help there. There's just no way to spend much time "procrastiplanning" without realizing it. As for deciding what you really want, I've found that reading something on my todo list over and over again brings the question to the front. There's only so often I will look at an unwant item before I realize it's an unwant item.

I don't know what I want in this life. Yet even if I did, I would still need to remember some things.

Right now I need to remind myself to make a blogpost about isospin, make an appointment, look into a trip abroad and settle a money issue. I can't do all of this now and if I did one of these things I would have to take care to not forget the others.

How could I remember that without a good old paper and a pen?

I use todo lists too. I just don't consider them important areas to tweak/optimize.

One productivity product that I did like: The time of your life, by Tony Robbins. But it's very different from GTD type stuff, as it focuses more on figuring out what you want and thinking up smarter ways to achieve the goals. Ie it focuses on desired emotional outcomes rather than specific todos.

Todo-Systems should help you to find out what you want, and documentate it, so you remember it longer than a few minutes.

Of course, not all are succesfull at that ;)

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