Same here. Behind every neat list of boxes to tick, I see an endless array of lists stretching into the future, only terminating in the moment of my death. Ticking those boxes is like adding bricks to the wall that is burying me into the cellar.
To-Do Lists is one of them. Where she sees a way to organize herself and gets pleasure from "completing" lists, I see attempts to quantify an overwhelming amount of tasks that has no conveivable end. For my part, I have learned to adopt the mindset of "work stops when I decide I am done working," while is a healthy action for me that helps prevent my anxiety from running the show (and running me down), where as that same mindset would be abhorant to my wife. The funny part is that we both maintain about the same level of productivity overall, despite the opposing methods.
I suppose the take-away I am getting at is things like To-Do lists are going to be subjective, but the markets (particularly individuals that benefit from To-Do Lists) are going to treat them like a panacea for all that ails us. I refer to this promotion as Life Hack Hype, but I don't know if anyone shares my veiw or experiences on that.
FWIW, despite being more like GP's wife than GP themselves, "the process of quantifying the problem could become its own problem" is very much the case for me. It leads to some unique, hilarious (to an outside observer) ways of suffering.
I was born with ADD, but developed GAD in my 30s in response to living with ADD.
My medication is still working very well, but I've lost the drive of wanting to do things in an ordered fashion and decided to embrace my ADHD-fueled unstructured focus. I still use alarms and calendars for important stuff, I have a decent, productive daily routine, but the rest I play by ear and feel. It's exhilarating to have the focus to do things without the tyranny of the laundry list.
I got too much stuff to do already to also tick what's on my todo list.
Walling oneself into a tomb - exactly.
Life must extremely stressful to those for whom every discrete thing is a countdown to death.
Many people consider the day-to-day grind of a job as being akin to death; for OP and similar people, these daily tasks are the same thing
For me, it's about the uniformity of the checkbox experience. It reduces any achiement to "just another brick in the wall". Apparently for others, the same uniformity turns the tasks into something more like a game.
At the end of a day, I like to go back and look at artifacts that resulted from my efforts. Maybe I wrote something, or drew some sketches, or at least had a productive conversation in digital format. Re-reading those outputs feels meaningful in a way that looking at ticked boxes doesn't.
(In my day job I work on video meeting recording systems, among other things. One of the projects that I currently find very motivating is to produce better artifacts from meetings, e.g. automatically created video summaries with context-relevant graphics. Maybe my own love of reviewing work artifacts is why this feels so relevant, and somebody else will find them meaningless because the act of ticking a box — "Discussed X with N" — provided the same satisfaction.)