Why To-Do Lists Don’t Work and Done Lists Do | Hacker News Reader

Why To-Do Lists Don’t Work and Done Lists Do

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76 pointssmalter34 comments

I rely very heavily on todo lists at work. I'm responsible for a large amount of code and feature requests come in from all over, that have to be balanced with the overarching goals for developing the project.

My notetaking method: Pen and paper - copious amounts of paper, each with a monotonically increasing number in the corner. I have two 22" 1080p monitors in landscape mode, so that leaves room for a (full-height) file tree and two text buffers on the left screen, and a web browser and two console windows on the right screen - i'm not going to sacrifice any of those for note-taking software when i have the ultimate in note-taking hardware right in front of me.

My approach is basically, write down any tasks, regardless of how big and small. Be consistent yet flexible with the page layout. Every so often, take a break from work and cross off things that are complete; if a page is mostly crossed out, manually rewrite the remaining things onto a new page. This forces you to look back over old feature requests and evaluate them again in a modern context, rather then just having them build up in a bug tracker.

"My approach is basically, write down any tasks, regardless of how big and small"

I do the same thing using 3x5 cards. There is a loose system with the cards depending on the things that I am tracking. One card might be a list of all the things I just thought of that need to be done. Another might be a list of things that I know I need to do at some point in the next month or year. The thing that seems to work best for me is not having a particular structure to the cards.

Mini post-it notes tapped on my desktop also work.

In any case as you are saying having a physical piece of paper seems to work very well.

Oh yeah - I rewrite the cards as well as I cross of a few things that have been completed.

I use business cards (my old ones and others'). Finally a productive use for them. :)

There was an HN article posted 6 months ago (maybe?) from an ivy-league study (Harvard I want to say...) that found the difference between productive people and unproductive people which seems to suggest the opposite of this blog post.

The study found that people who focus on the future and the work that needs to get done, tend to get more done, be more productive and subsequently were more successful.

The people that focused primarily on what had been done experienced a false sense of "completion" and had a tendency to stop working or take longer breaks between tasks.

FWIW, I do see this compulsion of focusing on "tomorrow" (defined as 'whatever is next') in successful people, but I also see very little appreciation for the "Now" or what they have accomplished.

I have tried to balance my moments of compulsion about tomorrow/next/more/bigger/do-it! with taking stock of the life I am leading from time to time and enjoying it. I am happier as a result and am capable of enjoying beautiful life-moments that would have previously been impossible for me to experience without anxiety.

Personal Aside: My wife and I went to Bora Bora years ago as part of a bigger trip to NZ. The total serene beauty of Bora Bora almost drove me insane. I wanted to try and paddle one of the kayaks back home at the time because my ego-driven mind was completely dominating my thoughts. I didn't see some of the world's clearest water or beautiful sand, I only saw "No high speed internet", "No IDE", "No code" and "No progress" which, at the time, meant the world was going to steam-roll me and I was going to fail miserably.

After getting home I knew I had to do something about that way of thinking. I knew the only thing that was waiting for me at the end of THAT path was a life of stress, ulcers, pain and the inability to deal with change or an occasional life-sized curveball with any sort of control.

Happiness is my default state now. I wasn't even trying to accomplish that... it is a side effect of very little work, just an awareness of what my thoughts are doing.

I am always suspicious of advice based on studies of "what successful people do" because there is a high potential for false causality, and for inapplicability to other people's lives. I suspect that many of these habits of successful people are simply side effects of the way that their minds work, and that they may not work for someone whose mind works differently. Ripe bananas are yellow, but painting a green banana yellow does not ripen it.

I will speculate as to how it might be that being successful is correlated with looking forward, even if that is not an inherent fact: the "to-do list" is a familiar, well-known concept, while the "done list" is not. So if you're motivated by the future, you have a ready-made tool that will make you more successful. If you're motivated by your recent accomplishments, you have no such tool - and you may even make things worse by using a future-motivating tool that is not effective for you.

Like I said, this is speculation and hypothesis. But I will say from experience that it is often the case that person A has a habit that seems effective, and person B sees no benefit from adopting that habit.

Ripe bananas are yellow, but painting a green banana yellow does not ripen it.

You're making a huge assumption here that the way someone's mind works is fixed and unalterable. I don't believe this. I think, and have some personal experience here, that you can change the way you think about things, the way you approach things, etc. And you can certainly develop the way successful people look at the world.

I actually think the banana metaphor is excellent: a certain technique may not work for person A, who thinks about the world in A way. But, that person can work to change their mind, to ripen, and eventually see the world close to the way that person B does.

>You're making a huge assumption here that the way someone's mind works is fixed and unalterable.

Well first off, that's not what I meant by my analogy. I was making a point about causality vs. correlation.

Secondly people's minds are certainly alterable, but the extent to which they can be altered is not unlimited. Moreover, given a scale with A) altering your mind so that you can adopt someone else's habits, and B) adopting habits which play to your current strengths, it makes more sense to tend toward B when possible.

What I find funny is that the article really argues for Done lists in conjunction with todo lists rather than replacing todo lists.

A better article might have been "Why To-Do Lists Need Done Lists".

That is a great point. I only just realised that it could easily get confusing. To do lists have their place, no doubt about it. Done lists are a fairly new concept and work extremely well in conjunction with them, just like you mentioned. Will remember that for future posts, thanks man.

I think Done lists are probably a good way of staying motivated.

I guess I've kind of been doing it already as my last task of the day is to quickly write down what I've been working on during the day (not necessarily completed though).

Also the article mentions: "When smaller things are too easy to get done, smaller, less important things are all you will get done."

But I don't really see how Done lists help with this.

I recently had to submit a revised work plan containing only big projects. In my revision, I noted that I had completed 3 big ticket items from my last plan, which made me feel pretty good, even though I had added some new ones. After I submitted it, I realized that I was ready to deploy another one, so I did, and submitted a new revision right away. Having a done list definitely motivated me to look at the big picture.

Agreed, I have a grid of 4 whiteboards in my office, two are for actual white boarding, one is my open-ended todo list (sorted ideas) and the other is a done list of those ideas.

Anytime I get overwhelmed, I take a moment to review the done list and enjoy watching things shift from one to the other.

When friends come over I encourage them to draw me something fun on the done list which also helps me realize that life is about being happy with things you accomplish, not just getting them done.

My sh-todo script tries to deal with the issue of keeping track of what you've done and when:

https://github.com/asb/sh-todo

Once you've marked an item as done, it still shows up as crossed off when you run 'todo' (seeing a list with lots of things crossed out can be motivational). When you want to tidy your todo list up just do 'todone-archive'. To look back at what you've achieved and when, just do 'todone-view'. This article is making me think that perhaps it would be worth while to have a way of adding something directly to your todone list (rather than having to add it as a todo and them mark it done).

Why & when done lists don't work:

http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/ayelet.fishbach/research/KF_...

Very interesting find pknight: "4 studies show that emphasizing to-date information increases goal adherence when commitment is uncertain—that is, when participants study for a relatively unim- portant exam, consume luxuries, fulfill a desire, and make first-time contributions to a charity. Con- versely, emphasizing to-go information increases goal adherence when commitment is certain—that is, when participants study for an important exam, consume necessities, fulfill a need, and make repeated contributions to a charity."

emacs org-mode works great for this by showing the status for each item in the list. No mess, no fuss and a great way to review progress or refresh the status of a task you've left for a while.

I use http://teuxdeux.com/ to save my todo, if you don't do a task planned for a day it's moved to the day after, you always have an overall view of the week. It's simple and there is an iphone app for it, i'm very happy with it.

I love the week view of TeuxDeux. A combination of TeuxDeux and http://www.timeslot.me/ would be really good.

I wish they used some sort of evidence to support the claim.

Even if the evidence was: "here's how I know I got more done on days without to-do lists," that would be more convincing than "to-do lists don't work, because I say they don't."

While I agree that keeping track of what's been complete is important, it feels like a bandaid solution to a much bigger problem. While I dislike the waterfall method, it does give you the sense of moving towards a final goal. One of the problems of not setting larger/aggregate goals/milestones is the potential to be lost in the details, and to lose momentum and motivation. Many projects die an early death or go completely off the rails due to a lack of solid goals. Some people end up quitting jobs when they feel their company lacks direction.

my todo list: cat todo

my done list: git log

Here's a tip from agile development:

Give your tasks estimates (1, 2, 3,...). They wouldn't directly represent time spent, but relative complexity of the task.

You'll be able to see how many points you've finished in a day and your average velocity per day. You'll be able to plan your day, and resist working on something that won't give you points.

Interesting how this article neatly intertwines with the "How Companies Learn Your Secrets" article that is also on the HN frontpage.

After reading the cue-routine-reward bit in that other article, it's clear that many todo lists miss closing the loop on forming a habit of getting things done.

Don't all To-do lists keep a record of what you checked off? I guess the article is saying that list should be emphasized more? A good webapp for that might be http://Trello.com. It seems to be made for dragging tasks from Todo to Done.

I consider this to be a matter for personal experimentation. I am not convinced of the one size fits all approach.

I believe it is good to have various concepts and models of the way motivation works. However, those that apply to you may be different to those that apply to others.

Here's an idea that just occurred to me:

Todo -> Future

Done -> Past

Present?

Perhaps a Doing list of length 1? Distractions are often the cause of procrastination, and of lack of motivation. The Doing list is perhaps the one we should be referring to most!

(I'm very much into the philosophy-meta-self-help stuff so please excuse me if this is way out there.)

You would probably like David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) book. I think your "Doing" list is what he would call "Next Action", the very next task you can begin because it has no blocking dependencies.

I started using both todo and done lists using this bash script http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2010/12/minimally-awesome-todos/

That's a great script, but it only displays the todo list. Did you hack it to show done items? The author's point is that a done list is only useful if you see it.

I really like that background script, might have to give that a try.

If you use Emacs, you might try org-mode - it includes an archive feature that allows you quickly toss subtrees into a second associated text file, which I find handy for keeping a 'done' list.

I do both: there's nothing more motivating for me than a long to-do list with more than half the items crossed off.

What is with all of these "Why to do lists don't work" posts on HN? I use them and they work fine for me.

I keep todo lists of various sorts. But recently, I added what it effectively a done list. I bought a spiral-bound monthly planner and a pack of colored felt-tip pens. At the bottom of each month's page, I create a legend for the different categories of tasks (e.g. different projects, personal goals), and each time I complete a Pomodoro (25 minute block) in a category, I fill in a corresponding circle for that day. I also summarize the achievements of the day in writing.

It's surprisingly motivating to look down and see all the progress that's been made.

Push vs Pull mentality.

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