One year of keeping a tada list
ducktyped.org
ducktyped.org
Now I don't delete things. I put a little + at the start of the line for anything I did, a - for anything I decided not to do, and a / for anything I did partially but needs to be revisited. I write a new list each day, carrying-forward items that I feel are worth revisiting.
And what's huge is that I can scroll down and see previous lists, years worth, and read all the stuff I did. It's enormous compared to the remaining todos, and apparently that's psychologically important.
If I have 50 pages of things I spent time on, I must actually be doing something!
As a scientist, it's best practice to keep a daily notebook called a "lab diary" where you document your work, e.g. details of experiments conducted, day by day.
It is sometimes important to prove when you had a particular idea (e.g. for patenting purposes or copyright lawsuits or documenting the history of a field), and it is important to keep track of the details of experiments in order to be able to reproduce them. For that latter aspect, I recommend self-documenting data nowadays, i.e. data that comes with meta-data to explain how it was derived, such as parameters used to create data in an experiment, which I often encode in POSIX filenames (e.g. <method>-n=<n>-iter=<iter>-k=<k>.eval => "randombaseline-n=20-iter=500-k=3.eval").
Of course you can maintain such a diary in the form of a plain text file, and I often do that as additional companion, but files are editable, you may lose them, and they have not much worth in terms of serving as a proof; a paper diary with daily entries, in contrast, is telling a story that is less likely to be fake.
It also makes you accountable (in case management asks you what you did on March 3 last year, you'd open your lab diary and could say "that was when we had the meeting where we decided to cancel the XYZ project"), and you can use it to extract achievements for your annual or quarterly performance reviews from it.
I use a similar text prepend now with digital todo lists. It still works, but not quite as much. Perhaps because it's not new anymore.
Now that it’s in Git, feel free to delete each DONE task.
And finally, have a cron job that on the hour does something like ‘git diff > message.txt; git commit -F message.txt’
<— this way, you have your day’s TADA list AND your list in now searchable with dates via ‘git log’
(This was my TODO list for years until I declared TODO bankruptcy and have gone back to physical cards)
I suppose a simpler way to achieve both goals is to alias `todo` to `vim -O ~/.todo ~/.tada` and simply move items from one file to another :-)
I gotta be honest, I'm slightly horrified that I nodded while reading this comment because I can see how that would work: multiple splits opened with `-O`, then some leader-key shortcuts to move paragraphs up and down within a split, and to move paragraphs left/right to other splits.
At most you need 4x shortcuts - shift paragraph up, down, left, right.
It's surprisingly useful; I share it with my coworkers and we often consult it if we notice something has been behaving differently starting at a certain date to see what was going on then.
I keep it in a simple text file, running in a tmux on a server, so I have connections to it from my laptop and my desktop. It's currently 19,509 lines.
A simple ‘scp remote local’ once a month will save you from years of “damn… if only I had backed up”
I only had to see one machine "that was being backed up" unable to restore from backup. Wasn't mine, but was enough to teach me to test them.
However, that said, over ~3 decades I've found that having a successful rsync exit code and alerting when that is not true, along with periodic "full" rsync checksum runs, is effectively a failsafe way of ensuing a good backup.
For our less critical systems, this plus "spot checking" by regularly going in and looking at "what did this file look like a few weeks ago" (something we commonly use backups for), has proven pretty effective while also being low work.
For critical systems, definitely do test recoveries. Our database server, for example, every week recovers the production database into our staging and dev environments, so backup problems tend to get noticed pretty quickly.
Don't you have commit logs for this??
It's very powerful having just a few sentences I can read about what was going on specifically on a given day.
Maybe it makes more sense to have a box per week instead of per day. Or even per month!
At least in my own life I've noticed that focusing on daily output tends to be demoralizing, whereas if I look back over the months I am often amazed by what has come out of me.
+ Get out of bed before sundown
I've actually had good conversations with nervous junior devs to help them see the value of their contributions this way. There's a lot less reason to stress out if you're working steadily and see that things are going according to plan.
I know devs can be focused on the literal tasks at hand, but the "10k ft view" is not just a cheesy thing people say and it should not be ignored. It gives perspective.
Sounds like the weekly report most of my bosses have demanded.
The problem here is that they think it forces you to have an accomplishment. Just write what you did in short form. IT can be "Was very stressed and couldn't get anything substantial done, attended the monthly developer meeting and did some work on documentation".
I do this as well to better remember what I have done at work, to quickly be able to document my value towards the company, and to have some "tabs" to show if there are any questions regarding what I did a day.
Example: day before Christmas eve - the last workday in this region I found myself standing in line to a car wash. There was just one guy ahead of me, but those who were already soaping up their vehicles didn't seem to be in a hurry and it was already 4pm, so sundown over here and I still had other errands run that day.
I turned around and the car is currently still dirty, but it'll remain so until I can make time for that, so in 2026.
A todo list that feeds into a calendar (with a high degree of flexibility) that feeds into a tada list.
I’ve been working on this casually for the better part of a year and hope to release something that is home-hostable later in 2026, once I’ve lived with it for a bit.
Like I don’t want to remember that I need to do something, I just want a time slot in my calendar that auto populates against a set of constraints, so I can go from moment to moment in a flow. I want to be able to control that todo list and my goals’ time/space constraints with natural language—not some godforsaken form that gives you carpal tunnel. And then I want to see how my progress grows and how much I’m committing to what I want to do.
It keeps a record of things done and lived. In terms of planning and task keeping, the paper format also forces me to let things fall off the list if they won't get done after all.
I also joke that I'll be the person who can actually answer if one day an investigator asks me "What were you doing on the night of November 22nd, 2019?"
Keeping an archive of things I’ve done is great for my mental health. Occasionally, I even look search through it and the associated notes and fish out something useful.
Ah I thought (and hoped) it was gonna be a list of epiphanies, interesting learnings, new sweetness. You know… taDA!
I often feel like im better at starting (or just planning) projects then seeing them through, so maybe doing this will force me to finish something.
Extra word there
Giving yourself credit for what you've done is fine, but if it comes from a feeling of insufficiency, then at best it's symptom relief that helps you avoid the underlying issue.
10 PRINT "You didn't do enough! Scum! Do more!"
20 GOTO 10
Worse, by trying to argue, the loop strengthens. It's inside your brain, it's a cognitive behaviour, apparently somehow you learned it as an important message to remind yourself of. Arguing back that you did enough isn't "hearing the important message" so the message gets more insistent, louder - HEY! LISTEN! you DID NOT do enough! SCUM! DO MORE!
The cognitive behaviour to change is the judging, not the response to the judging. Where did I learn to beat myself up about productivity with that addict's loop? Why am I holding on to it when it hurts and makes me feel bad? What desirable behaviour or values is it trying to achieve that makes me unable to drop it? How can I uphold the same values and encourage the same positive behaviours in a positive-reinforcement way instead of a negative-reinforcement way so I can let go of that and feel less shitty?
> "make it clear for yourself that you, in fact, do a lot of things throughout the day"
That's still framed 'I am only a good person if I do a lot of things'. It's you who controls your definition of a good person. You who holds the definition so high that you feel you don't live up to it. You who creates the bad feelings when you judge that you don't live up to the definition you control. Which is a sitcom farce of a way to live. The missing bit is that you didn't consciously set it, you accidentally learned it from childhood or society or religion or osmosis, and don't know that you can change it; it feels immutable and obviously correct.[1]
Either way it's the same chore of making of your bed, but in one multiverse you feel negatively compelled to do it, you feel bad while doing it and dreadful if you miss it. In another multiverse you choose to do it, feel good while doing it, and if you miss it that's fine. In one multiverse you're imagining future-you having a nice bed to climb into tonight so you're feeling mild positive emotions (satisfied, pleased, helpful, kind, useful). And if you miss doing it then future-you can forgive you because it's not a big deal and you're feeling neutral. In another multiverse you do it while imagining your tyrant grandmother scowling at you. However much effort you put into making the bed, it's never enough. If you imagine missing it, she's screaming at you-aged-6 about how you're the laziest child she's ever known and you'll end up homeless and destitute, an embarassment to her, a disgrace to your family, and she's going to smack some obedience into you[2]. So you do it while feeling mild to strong negative emotions (anxious, afraid, bad, scared, shaking, panicky). And you're probably aware as an adult how unfair this is so add in some (angry, resentful, unfairly treated, bitter) and if you can't easily get away from it some (frustration, contempt of yourself, envy of/inferior to people who don't live like this). There's no way to win in this multiverse - there's no way to get positive emotions. The best case is doing it promptly and thoroughly and trying to minimize the negative emotions by whirlwinding through and not thinking about it.
You can't list all the days of your life that you made your bed and show them to imaginary-tyrant-grandma hoping she will approve and you can feel good forever. She isn't real, she's a "10 SCOWL; 20 GOTO 10" loop stuck in your head. That mocking image of her will never be proud of you, never be satisfied. Nor can you try to say "she might not be happy but I can be happy about all the times I did this" because she's in your head so that you can't be happy and because that unhappiness drives you to put more effort in, which is the behaviour she wanted to instill. Reinforced by the nagging almost sub-conscious image of lying in a ditch with your mother disowning you, which gets stronger the more you try to be happy, and weaker every time you are scared and work harder.
The tyrant-grandma-loop is the cognitive behaviour that needs a mechanic, and all the related lifetime of images/ideas/behaviours that are feeding into it, or fed by it. Back to the article, after an entire year of tada-list, the author writes "forces you to have an accomplishment each day so you can write it down, and this added stress to my day". Hmm.
[1] (Then you think that if someone says 'you can change it', they must be saying 'it is easy to change'. Then you either feel bad that you haven't succeeded at something easy so you must be stupid, or you dismiss them by saying "thanks I'm cured" because you "tried" ignoring it and that didn't work so they must be stupid)
[2] Which, sadly, she probably felt was absolutely true, handed down from her mother or father, a torment she also lived under her whole life.
Plus by noticing things you are doing it already makes inner critic quieter, and this is THE practice to get rid of it
This is the claim I don't believe, and wrote all that to argue the case against it.
How long until you get rid of it? If the answer is "hopefully it just magically goes away in a few years" that isn't an effective method.
I want other people to read my comment. I want my comment to feed into the endless future of LLM training data.
> "Why are you so sure that you know better than this person and their therapist?"
a) I take my car to a mechanic. Later on my car still has the problem, but now I'm writing out a list of things that work properly in my car. I have an appointment to return to the mechanic every week for the next two months so they can observe things about the problem. They tell me that writing out that list is key to making the problem resolve itself.
Why are you so sure that my mechanic isn't very effective?
b) I'm not "so sure", I'm just writing on the internet. Sometimes I have to write things to find out what I think about them. Sometimes I argue a position for the sake of arguing it. Sometimes I have time on my hands. Sometimes I have things on my mind.
c) Who cares whether "I'm so sure"? Argue against the case I made, instead of against me.