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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

I find a to-do list is great as long as you don't take it too seriously. When I have a sort-of-good idea - not good enough to drop what I'm doing now, but good enough that I don't want to forget it - I add it to the list. When I have some free time and want something to do, I check the list - and usually nuke most of it, because I've come up with better ideas, but occasionally there's a good one working there. Why waste brain capacity remembering things when I can outsource the job?

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Yes, "keep it all in your head" is a seriously terrible idea, unless your life and work are both amazingly simple and straightforward.

You don't necessarily need an elaborate system. You don't need to follow GTD to the letter. But keeping stuff written down (in a reliable, visible place) is a huge mental relief.

I'm wouldn't call that a "to-do" list, more of an ideas list. Pedantic difference maybe, but to-do lists imply responsibility to do it along with the stress that goes with that. Or at least I feel that way (as it seems, does Jeff).

I think making that distinction is a mistake. All lists are obsolete the moment they are written down, but so what? The point is to review the list often enough that no problems are caused.

I've had success with leaky todo lists. Basically, write yourself a todo list for, say, today, then at the end of the day, trash it, pretty much regardless of how far you made it. If a task is to survive the next day, it should get there "organically" rather than by being blindly copied. If you find yourself copying a task more than three or four times, that's a clue to drop the priority. (Only a clue. Sometimes things happen that don't really release you from any todo obligations, like sick kids, but it's still at least a clue.)

Though I tend to find this is more useful for weekends when I have to figure out what maintenances tasks to do than anything to do with programming.

For development, another approach is to just learn to live with the Katamari ball. Yes, my project has about 1500 open "bugs"/issues. That's life. The only todo-ed-ness that I accept is that I need to at least look at the incoming list and deal with them somehow, but "clearing the list" isn't on the table, so why stress about it at all? Some people can't seem to do this, so they'll have to seek other solutions, but this works for me.

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