Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

This is the opposite of what I do. My TODO list has exactly one item on it: the most important thing. Once that's done, I will then pick the new most important thing and it will become the only item on my TODO list.

I do this for 2 main reasons:

If I have too many items on my TODO list and I get tired or lazy (which happens too often), then I will gravitate to those items which are easiest or the most gratifying at that moment without regard to importance. The problem is that I don't realize that I'm working on a lower priority until it's too late and my time has been lost.

The other reason is that I believe I really don't know what the second most important thing to do is until after I've done the first most important thing. I have discovered that I learn a lot through both the process and the result of doing the first item. That learning often reveals what to do next. (Ex: Now that I understand what the process must be, I have to redo the database schema.)

OP's description of his system was very interesting. It made me wonder if I'm missing something.

Alex, would it invade your privacy too much to see an example of your TODO list? (An example's worth a thousand words.)

How do you ensure that stuff like filing your taxes becomes the most important thing by some suitable time? I felt Getting Things Done made a compelling claim that any TODO that isn't written down will continually occupy a bit of my brain, due to anxiety about overlooking it (which I definitely have).

I think Ed's approach is not necessarily incompatible with GTD. All he is saying is that he uses only one context is his next-actions list (@now?), which usually contains only one item. Everything else is in a someday/maybe list...

I particularly enjoy the GTDish technique of emptying one's mind and all inboxes, but I have also been trapped in too many "what-if" scenarios and in non-important tasks. Thus, I really think that Ed is making a valid point here.

BTW, filing taxes should be only a reminder in your calendar or tickler system.

What if you really want to achieve something that will naturaly take about 10 years?

Surely somewhere during that time you'll concurrently have other, less important, objectives.

Not to mention that by sharing it, he would be 33% more likely to accomplish whatever is on the list.

Or more likely to not accomplish whatever is on the list. I read a study that claimed that the act of sharing what you intend to do makes you believe you are making progress before you even started - and making it more likely that you will not accomplish whatever you had intended.

This most likely varies a lot depending on the person. For me, telling someone what I intend to do is a good motivator (although I'm sure it would loose its value if I abused it).

Derek Sivers offers a counterargument (with citations) here: http://sivers.org/zipit

Doesn't this assume all your potential tasks fall in one category or lead to one big goal like an inportant client project or something? What happens if two sets of tasks are unrelated, like dealing with kids vs projects? How do you keep the todo list from having more than one task in this case?

I believe that most tasks can be characterized by three attributes: importance, size and urgency. Unfortunately, most people want immediate gratification, so they will tend to focus on small, urgent tasks so that they can get that immediate reward, even if they have other tasks to that are important, large but not yet urgent. By the time the important, large tasks become urgent, there frequently isn't enough time to do them properly, and they get rushed, with predictably unsatisfactory results. It's really hard to work on a task with a deadline a month away, when there's something that can be completed easily, that's due today.

I believe that the best way to solve this problem is to take those big, important problems and divide them into much smaller chunks, and then give them intermediate deadlines that will ensure that enough progress is made that when the final deadline approaches, you won't be facing a huge task that hasn't even been started.

Of course, this idea doesn't give you a free pass from exercising some self-discipline; you have to honor those intermediate deadlines and actually make some progress on those important, big problems.

Interesting. I wanted to make "Yet Another Todo List" that was really only about the most important things you had to do today, picked from a "backlog" of all the different things you could do, in no particular order.

The point being that a long task list is useless, but the few most important things to do today is helpful.

single-threaded in other words. This is hardly a viable way to execute anything. It may seem like a sequence of serial single goals but in fact you're unknowingly multitasking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com