
Todon't - RossM
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/todont.html
======
btilly
Jeff is doing it wrong. A to-do list should be for things that you need to do,
not thing that you'd like to do some day.

Here is what I do when I need to be particularly organized and productive. I
call it a to-done list. (I'm lazy and probably have ADHD, so I never sustain.
But whenever I do this it feels great, and it is never hard to start it up
again when I get motivated.)

I start with a small list of things that I absolutely have to do, in roughly
the order that I plan to tackle them. Put that in a plain text file. Write the
date below that list.

Take the bottom task, break it up into subtasks, recursively, until I've got a
task I can work on right now. Do it. Move it down off the list to the date. If
I get blocked on that one, add the blocker below the task and pick another
task. Continue all day.

The next day I start by putting that day's date above the old date, and then
continue again.

The keys to this are the following:

1\. I ONLY include things that I HAVE to do. (Adding all of the, "It would be
good to some day" or "I'd like to" leads to depression as described by Jeff.)

2\. Items are SPECIFIC and SMALL. The goal is to constantly move them off the
list into done.

3\. Only include CURRENT stuff. If there is a project that is intended for 3
months from now, it does not go on the list.

This list serves 2 purposes. The bit at the top is pretty much a LIFO stack (I
add at the bottom, take off from near the bottom) of what I am currently
working on. So it is the whole, "I need to do Y in order to do X, be sure I
get back to X eventually." And the long list at the bottom is a log of how
much I got done, which makes me feel good.

If you try this, be aware that a quickly growing top section is proof that
you're doing it wrong. Go through the top bit and ruthlessly prune off
everything that doesn't need to be there. Yes, I know that some people feel
good about taking a list of high level tasks and breaking it up right away to
get organized. But really, this makes the list explode, and you won't do as
good a job of exploding it out as you will when you are closer to actually
doing that item.

The rule of thumb is, if you have trouble scrolling through the todo to the
already done, the todo is clearly too long.

~~~
7402
> Jeff is doing it wrong. A to-do list should be for things that you need to
> do, not thing that you'd like to do some day.

Please. I think a certain amount of humility is called for when making claims
about how someone ELSE could improve his or her productivity.

For example, in my own practice (and contrary to the above), a to-do list has
the most value to me precisely for things that I'd like to do someday, and not
things I need to do now. This is because I need the list for things that tend
to float out of short-term memory. I don't need it for immediate or high-
priority tasks, because I tend not to forget those. People are different.

It's absolutely a fine thing to say, "This practice improved my productivity.
I offer it to you, for your evaluation, in case you find it helpful, too." But
even if 95% of workers are more productive with practice X, maybe I am a
member of the 5% minority that is more productive with practice Y. It is silly
to assume that given various ways of approaching a problem, there is ONE way
that will better for 100% of people .

Being a professional means I own the responsibility for deciding how to
accomplish something. Sometimes a group needs to reach a consensus on how to
do something, e.g., pick one source code control system, rather than letting
each programmer pick whichever they think makes them individually most
productive. But choosing a personal to-do list is personal decison.

~~~
dasil003
> _Please. I think a certain amount of humility is called for when making
> claims about how someone ELSE could improve his or her productivity._

Agreed. However this was just an indignant HN comment against Jeff Atwood who
committed the sin orders of magnitude worse by beaming out this nonsense to
his tens of thousands of readers.

Everything that Jeff said in his article boils down to spending too much mired
in productivity porn, then overreacting and declaring that todo lists are
useless and you shouldn't use them.

~~~
psweber
> However this was just an indignant HN comment against Jeff Atwood who
> committed the sin orders of magnitude worse by beaming out this nonsense to
> his tens of thousands of readers.

I agree with your agreement, but it certainly would be an interesting
experiment to try to train your brain to take back some of the responsibility
you put on list. My memory is relatively weak, so I make lists of things I
actually have to do, too.

~~~
dasil003
I don't need to do that experiment because that's how I lived my life for the
first 30 years! I only got into GTD because eventually my life did get complex
enough that I _did_ forget things and I _did_ suffer mental anguish about
personal failures as a result of not having a more robust system. The way I do
things now is perfectly in proportion to my needs. I certainly don't read
lifehacker or 57folders, and I am not addicted to productivity. I use
OmniFocus about 20 mins a week, and _I am a much happier person_ and
definitely more productive on the deep engineering stuff because I don't have
anything nagging at the back of my mind.

Jeff telling me I should stop using todo lists is like an alcohol telling me
to stop drinking. No, _you_ should stop drinking, _I_ should drink however
much I like because I don't have a problem with it.

------
SCdF
This is an interesting reaction, but I'm not sure it goes deep enough.

What is a bug tracking system if not a glorified todo list?

What is a shopping list if not a glorified todo: buy X list?

When you think up a cool idea for a project or learn about a technology you
want to explore next time it fits and add it to your project log / text file /
notepad, isn't that basically a todo list?

These things are really important: I can't remember every bug my software has,
I often forget something I wanted to buy (goddamn avocados, honestly every
time they slip my mind), and I can't work on every idea I come up with
straight away.

I people who have problems with todo lists are using them, I hesitate to say
it, incorrectly. They shouldn't run your life, they are just a place to jot
things down.

~~~
codinghorror
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/07/09.html>

> But I have noticed that in many real-world companies, the desire never to
> miss any bug report leads to bug bankrupcy, where you wake up one day and
> discover that there are 3000 open bugs in the database, some of which are so
> old they may not apply any more, some of which can never be reproduced, and
> most of which are not even worth fixing because they’re so tiny. When you
> look closely you realize that months or years of work has gone into
> preparing those bug reports, and you ask yourself, how could we have 3000
> bugs in the database while our product is delightful and customers love it
> and use it every day? At some point you realize that you’ve put too much
> work into the bug database and not quite enough work into the product.

doesn't really work, though, does it?

~~~
SCdF
Jeff this is a bit fallacious.

There is a fairly intelligible difference between "keeping a list of bugs that
need to be fixed never works let's just remember it in our heads" and "bug
databases often get misused and the result is they fill up with junk".

The downsides noted in that quote are definitely valid, and I've worked in
companies / projects where that happens, but I don't think that completely
invalidates them as a concept.

~~~
cmccabe
A bug tracker is not a TODO list. I work on Hadoop, and there are bugs that
have been open for 6 years now, and probably will be open for 6 more. Bug
trackers can help you compose a TODO list (sometimes called a roadmap, in a
corporate context), but they are not themselves TODO lists.

------
mistercow
>If you can't wake up every day and, using your 100% original equipment God-
given organic brain, come up with the three most important things you need to
do that day – then you should seriously work on fixing that.

Wow, talk about some ableist nonsense.

Why is it so hard for people to understand that different productivity tools
work well for different people? Letting go of the typical mind fallacy is a
very important step in understanding how to take advice from other people.

~~~
peterhajas
> discrimination in favor of able-bodied people

Huh? Is the original post discriminating against people who are not able-
bodied?

------
dkarl
I've largely replaced long-term TODO lists with calendar reminders. That's
what my TODOs were anyway, reminders of what I intended to do at some point in
the future, and I was always seeing items too late (ahhhhh shit shit shit!) or
too early (meh, ignore) so now I just stick each item on my calendar on a date
that seems appropriate.

Most TODO lists that aren't reminders are just glorified brainstorming. For
example, when I make a list of steps for getting something done, I consider it
disposable. A task list I generate from scratch tomorrow will probably be more
accurate than the one I was working from today. Like design documents, task
lists are perennially stale, more harmful than helpful.

The one exception to the above two rules is my shopping list, because nothing
sucks more than waking up in the morning and not having any coffee.

~~~
codinghorror
I too find the calendar much more useful than the generic to-do list. For one
thing, if you can't come up with a specific date you need this done by or
on... YAGNI. :)

~~~
icebraining
But a calendar is just a todo list where the items appear based on a date.
Your position is inconsistent, in my opinion.

~~~
kamaal
Correct,

Precisely calendars are a very effective way of maintaining list of lists with
deadlines(dates).

------
3rd3
I’m convinced of to-do lists. There is one important rule that often helps:
Don't put things on your list that take less than 10 minutes of your time. Do
those things right away instead!

I write my lists in SublimeText 2 using this plug-in:
<https://github.com/groenewege/mdTodo> Basically, it provides only one
shortcut for marking tasks as completed. That way I don’t lose time by
fiddling with the UI of one of those to-do list apps.

------
nostromo
All lists for me are transient and limited in scope and usually very
effective. For example: "remaining things to do before shipping version x" or
"things to get at Costco".

I think lists break down when you try to make a single list for your whole
life that lasts forever.

------
dwc
I've tried and failed to use to-do lists off and on over many years. Now I'm
using the ultra simple Reminders app that comes with iOS, and it's working for
me. The only good thing about the app is the complete lack of features, and
that it's with me always.

I only put down little things that I'm likely to forget. I give myself
permission in advance not to do _any_ of them at any specific time. But when I
find myself with spare time and motivation, I always have a couple of things I
can pick off the list. It's helped me get a _lot_ more little things out of
the way. The big things are another matter, but with fewer little things
cluttering my brain…

------
neilk
There was an art project I saw a while ago where you got to confess all your
undone ideas to a "priest", and you got absolved of the responsibility for
doing them. Maybe this is the curse of living in a world where so much more is
possible.

But OP goes too far when he says that you should rely only on your brain's
natural scheduling and short term memory. I mean, without a grocery list, I
can't even remember all the ingredients to make a birthday cake.

Prioritizing is hard. I don't think there are any simple solutions. But maybe
we need some sort of trigger to know when we should throw out undone projects,
or cast them into some very far back burner. What would that be?

~~~
B-Con
> But he goes too far when he says that you should rely only on your brain's
> natural scheduling and short term memory. I mean, without a list, I can't
> even remember all the ingredients to make a birthday cake if I go to the
> store and that is my one and only task there.

This is mainly what I do with my to-do lists. It's the odd-ball things that
need to get done, but aren't pillars for future progress in the day and are
out of my normal routine. To pick a random example, dropping off a letter in
the mail bin. If I don't do it, I wouldn't know for the rest of the day
because I'm never going to think, "Oh, I can't submit my progress report
because that letter is still in my backpack!" And I don't do it often, so I'm
used to ignoring the mail drop boxes anyway. Aside from my brain either
randomly remembering or pulling on a long thread and re-deriving the need to
mail a letter, there's no reason it would come to mind. But if I write it down
on a centralized list and I repeatedly check said list, hopefully I'll catch
it in time.

For me, a to-do list is a set of things that need to be done that otherwise
don't really fit into the normal flow of life, but still need to be done.

And I have a bad memory to boot. I forget things that aren't written down all
the time.

------
Toenex
In one sense Jeff is right, I have no problem remembering what __I __want to
do today. My problem is that I need to do things that other people want me to
do. Unfortunately my ability to remember is strongly weighted by my give-a-
shit level. Hence a list.

------
lampe
I Don't got todo lists! I got Questions!

This maybe a little bit queer but FOR ME it works!

How it works: First i dont got a APP! i got a little paper notebook and when i
got a Task i dont write down:"make the CSS work better". I Write:"How can you
make the css better?". Mostly the questions are tighter and more to the point
but this is just an example. I use diffrent Colors too ! Black/Blue just to
write it down Red/Green/Orange/etc. for things that let me later know what i
thought that moment. I Carry that thing always with me! ALWAYS! Maybe a
Solution for a problem comes in my mind when iam at the Metro or on the
Street.

Why i do that? I dont like Tasks! Tasks always have this: you MUST do that and
that... baaah NO I dont like it.

Really DONT use a APP! Wunderlist, the milk thing, evernote etc. are ALL good
app's but the just all take to long!

Maybe this will change with a Touchscreen and pen but i like my paper notebook
:)

------
moocow01
Ive put it at the top of my to-do list to use my brain and gut.

I think the problem with to-do lists is when people use them to track
literally what they are supposed to do for the day ... you should not need a
todo list to guide your day in the larger sense in my opinion. I think where
they actually are useful is tracking very small postponed tasks that would
otherwise be forgotten - software is filled with these sort of things and
probably the reason why devs think to-do lists are so instrumental.

------
edanm
Sometimes there are things I need to remember. Things like "remember to call
this person on Sunday", or "remember to deal with this issue in 3 weeks".
Sometimes it's personal (things like "go watch this movie that just came
out"), most of the times it's professional (like "take care of that problem
you had with the bank").

I don't have a good memory. I need to write these kinds of things down
somewhere. It's not (and shouldn't be) that complicated, but it's definitely
necessary.

~~~
nowarninglabel
That's what a calendar for. Just think about how more effective it is to
schedule a time to see a movie, rather than batting it around your to-do list.
What's the point of having a "remember to deal with this issue in 3 weeks"
point on your list, when it'd be much better to schedule 30 minutes in 3 weeks
where you take care of the issue.

~~~
edanm
What makes it better in my calendar?

Here are a few reasons I prefer this in a list, and _not_ part of my calendar:
1\. My calendar tells me specific places to be or people to talk with/meet at
specified times. This is important, because I've usually scheduled with these
people, so it's not up to me to change it. It's a set time for dealing with
something, that has to happen in that specific time. 2\. For todo items like
"see this movie", usually I don't need 30 minutes. I need 2 minutes to check
if the movie is out, decide whether I'll see that movie today or not, and if
not, move the task to another day. 3\. I don't have a specific I _need_ to
deal with that task. I'd rather not postpone it 300 times. 4\. I have 10's of
these tasks. I really don't want them cluttering up my calendar.

All of the above mean my calendar is my go-to place to see actual, important
things that I've scheduled with other people. My todo list is the place to see
little tasks that I need to do sometime. Perhaps on some specific day, but not
in any specific time. These tend to be very different kind of tasks.

------
optymizer
When I don't write things down in a TO-DO list, I always feel like I have a
cloud over my head, ready to explode into a hurricane. There is this pressure
and constant iteration going on: "you've got to do X", "you've go to do Y",
"you've to do Z, but you haven't even started Z", and can get overwhelming at
times. When you have at least 1 meeting per day at work with different teams,
when you've got school and associated deadlines, when you've got a significant
other, etc, you WILL BE overwhelmed with all of the things you need to do.

At some point, the brain cannot hold everything into 1 context and will kill
some things - some that may turn out to be important for you in the long run.
So I find it very productive to write things down in one or more to-do list,
and then switch contexts when the time comes. This allows me to concentrate on
1 thing at a time, knowing that I can later focus on all the other things I
need to do, without dropping the ball on any of those, because I happened to
forget about thing X or Y.

Nowadays, the only difficulty I face is performing the actual context switch.
For example, after working 8 hours in Node.js with vows, bootstrap, jqmobile,
mongodb,etc, it is painful to switch to working on a POSIX-compliant memory
manager in C99 and then switch into family-mode or friendly-guy mode and
entertain family/friends/etc. I found that performing some completely
unrelated activity (like playing basketball) helps ease the transition from
one context to the other, but I don't always have a 2 hour window for a
context switch.

Anyways, I use trello these days.

TL;DR: bullshit, TO-DO lists are very helpful and I am the living proof.

------
kamaal
>>I've tried to maintain to-do lists at various points in my life. And I've
always failed. Utterly and completely.

I don't know if Jeff has read "Getting Things Done" By David Allen. Or he has
read "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. With Regards GTD, David Allen
specifically mentions its very easy to get on and off GTD framework. Because
GTD does require a level discipline to get it work. Or any Time management
framework ever invented for that matter.

If to-do lists are not working for you, then you have one of the signs.

1\. You don't have a lot of things to do in your daily schedule at the first
place. Making the purpose of list obsolete.

2\. You have very few but large monolithic tasks that don't need to be written
down, and generally fit in comfortably into your brain cache.

3\. You are not frequently interrupted.

4\. You don't procrastinate.

5\. You are just not disciplined to follow the list discipline.

>>Eventually I realized that the problem wasn't me. All my to-do lists started
out as innocuous tools to assist me in my life, but slowly transformed, each
and every time, into thankless, soul-draining exercises in reductionism.

Sorry to-do lists do work. Don't make to-do lists a religious ritual you need
to follow. They are there for a reason and if you fit into that framework its
futile to use it.

>>Lists give the illusion of progress.

When were lists meant to measure progress? They are meant to track your work,
your brain only has a limited capacity to store things. When you put to many
to-do tasks in your brain, you start to worry about it. And then most of your
energy goes into worrying than executing those tasks.

The whole purpose of lists is to dump your brain on paper. Then execute them,
if you are interrupted you know where to start after you get back. In other
words they work like stacks in software.

>>Lists give the illusion of accomplishment.

Lists of completed Lists are definitely an _indication_ of accomplishment.

>>Lists make you feel guilty for not achieving these things.

That is why they work in most cases.

>>Lists make you feel guilty for continually delaying certain items. Lists
make you feel guilty for not doing things you don't want to be doing anyway.

Why do you put them on the list anyway. Lists are not books used to maintain
vision statements. They are tools to put _actionable items_ whose progress you
can measure.

>>Lists make you prioritize the wrong things.

Lists are dumb. You create them. How can they make you prioritize wrong
things.

The problem is over zealousness. As I said before a list is not your vision
statement.

Write things in the list what you want to do. Not what you dream about, or
want to have 10 years from now.

David Allen covers this in his book, These sort of things should ideally go in
a 10 year plan or whatever year plan and its progress must be reviewed every
Saturday or so.

>>Lists are inefficient. (Think of what you could be doing with all the time
you spend maintaining your lists!)

Think of what you could not be doing if you didn't know the time needed on
what you have been doing, doing currently or likely to do in the future. How
will you know where you could save time and use it elsewhere?

>>Lists suck the enjoyment out of activities, making most things feel like an
obligation.

This is true if you work at a resort. But if you are somebody who has to 5-6
meetings, go for status updates, answer 20 emails, solve two bugs, tend to
your home and track your personal projects all in a day. Without getting
organized you are not going to make it.

>>Lists don't actually make you more organized long term.

Because you stop just there. You don't have a list of lists.

>>Lists can close you off to spontaneity and exploration of things you didn't
plan for. (Let's face it, it's impossible to really plan some things in life.)

That is why you should run your life like an agile project and not in the
waterfall model.

>>If you can't wake up every day and, using your 100% original equipment God-
given organic brain, come up with the three most important things you need to
do that day

Most people don't have 3-most important things in life.

In fact lists exists because most don't have 3-most important things in life.

------
kiba
I don't have anything like a todo list. But I do have habits that I followed
religiously. I guess you can call it "Invisible Important TODO Items For
Today".

There are three items that I do every single day:

1\. Write 500 words a day, in which I usually spend writing about half baked
random things like "fear inoculation", "legoization" or "Conquering Rome with
Science". You can see random stuff at <http://kibabase.com/articles/notes-and-
thoughts>

2\. Walks 10K steps a day. I did it for an experiment that supposed to last 30
days, now it's in 37th days total. I am trying to build an analysis tool that
output pretty JSON of my data, but somehow keep neglecting it. You can read
what I have so far here: [http://kibabase.com/articles/self-
quantification#interventio...](http://kibabase.com/articles/self-
quantification#intervention-1---walking-10k-steps)

3\. Measure my step count, my blood pressure, my weight, and my pulse.

Well, actually there's a fourth item: read a book everyday.

It turns out that I didn't do the million other things that I wanted to do but
never do consistently, including coding. Coding should at least be a priority.

I can say with a straight face that even writing 500 words a day about random
things makes progress. Out of the random things pile in my Notes and Thoughts
page, I eventually spun off two essays, one of which is about my self
quantification effort in which I am currently doing 10K steps a day, the
others is for logging the ideas of the 16+ books I read so far this year. I
expect to add more essays to my site over time as essays mature from my
primordial soup of random ideas and notes.

These activities help keep me healthy and sane. It also makes me feel like a
badass, even when I am not.

------
ak217
This is bullshit.

Todo lists are the most basic form of a tool for triaging and prioritizing
your work. They are a minified, single-threaded version of issue/bug-tracking
systems. If you don't need a todo list (or an issue tracker) to remember all
the details of what must get done, you're either superhuman, or you're not
working on a hard enough problem.

------
WalterSear
I keep my entire life in one very complex 'todo' list wiki. Every day, I refer
to it, moving the 'next things to do' to a place of prominence. A couple of
times a week, I sit down and spend an hour or so shuffling things around. I
have been using this system for almost a decade now.

If Jeff hasn't found a way to make todo lists work for him, too bad.

~~~
icebraining
Of course, that means you spend at least thirteen full 8-hour workdays per
year just shuffling your todo list.

~~~
WalterSear
How much time to do you spend thinking about what needs to be done next?

~~~
icebraining
Negligible. What I _need_ to do is usually either what I had to do yesterday
and the day before, or an immediate reaction to some event.

What I _want_ to do is best decided in the moment, when all the information
(e.g. my mood, availability of other people) is available.

The exceptions don't take more than maybe a couple of minutes per week.

~~~
WalterSear
I didn't say anything about scheduling - just keeping all my projects and
plans in one place, so I can refer to them imediately, and don't have to worry
about remembering them. If this wouldn't benefit you, you must be living an
exceptionally simple life.

------
TeMPOraL
I've been suspecting for last few years that reading GTD and productivity
blogs in high school might have been the biggest mistake of my life, as I
remember that have always drown in overloaded lists of things not yet done
since that high school time, and somehow before it I never felt a need for
increasing productivity.

I feel that todo lists help me get through all those so called errands - stuff
I want to get done, but might not particularly enjoy the "doing" part.
Otherwise I would forget many of them. But in case of things that really
matter for me, writing down TODOs feels silly, as I'd rather actually _do_ the
stuff, not write about it.

But between work, university and my S.O., I have almost no time to actually do
anything from that TODO list, so it up being a list of stuff I could have got
done if I had a 40-hour day.

------
minhajuddin
>I have used a lot of tools to manage my TODO lists, I even wrote one (Taskr -
Simple command line utility to manage your tasks). However, I keep coming back
to pen and paper. I think I get it now, The biggest drawback of the Todo list
apps I've used was that they made managing my Todo lists easy. As a result of
which my lists started growing. When I use pen and paper, I have to copy
everything to a new page every single day, and THAT is NOT easy. It makes me
think which task is worth copying. At the end of the day, this is what makes
my todo lists sane. I think I am going to stick to pen and paper for my Todo
lists for a long time. [http://minhajuddin.com/2012/09/17/why-todo-lists-on-
paper-wo...](http://minhajuddin.com/2012/09/17/why-todo-lists-on-paper-work)

------
scott_meade
Jeff sums it up well: "If you can't wake up every day and, using your 100%
original equipment God-given organic brain, come up with the three most
important things you need to do that day – then you should seriously work on
fixing that."

~~~
smegel
So your boss comes up to you one afternoon and asks you to perform a minor,
yet important task the next morning, alongside the many, many other tasks and
activities, both work and private you have going on. Also, the following
morning your car breaks down and you end up getting to work late and
flustered. Amid all this chaos, you forget to perform the minor yet important
task asked of you, and you don't remember until you see you boss walking
towards you that afternoon with a concerned expression on his face.

Upon reflection, a smart person would say:

A) I really should write these things down somewhere, like maybe on a todo
list!

B) Nah, she'll be right, I won't forget next time!

Hint: the answer is "A"

------
dugmartin
Maybe we should just write our todo lists on flash paper and light them up at
the end of the week. If there is something important on there you would get it
done and if not you can see it go bye bye in an instant. No karmic backlog.

~~~
npsimons
I admire this solution for it's full-on tilt towards simplifying life (which
may be part of what Atwood was aiming for in the original post). Being a
sysadmin and programmer (esp. embedded), though, I'm always of the mind of
"just reliably log as much data as possible and sort it out later; disk space
is cheap; lost information is not." I would also contend, if you have an issue
with writing something down and then archiving it out of your todo list, is
that a problem with the system, or you? In any case, yes, logging everything
may be too much for some people. Me, I don't like to lose data, even if I
ignore it :)

------
dangoor
Mark Forster has written some very interesting ideas about todo lists (and the
management thereof).

<http://markforster.squarespace.com/>

One thing that's very cool about Mark Forster's approaches is that they have
always had the notion of going with your intuition on what you should be
working on _and_ they've also had a mechanism of throwing stuff away from the
list.

I totally agree about todo lists generally becoming giant Katamari balls. I
personally have no issue with the idea of having todo lists as long as you can
throw things away comfortably.

------
mathattack
This is a rare instance where Jeff is wrong.

There is a big difference between knowing your priorities (which Jeff
describes) and knowing all the little things that need to be done or will
cause problems later (what Jeff misses).

I find it very important to have the To Do lists to keep track of all the
little promises and expectations. Many of the great leaders I've worked with
have done similar. Those that don't have someone else keeping track of their
commitments.

Certain creative jobs can be isolated, but jobs that require interacting with
others require keeping track of all the details.

------
blvr
I'm glad if going todo-less works for the author but I wouldn't recommend it.
I doubt many people have the capacity to remember that meeting you're supposed
to have Friday after next at 3:30 or that little bug someone just mentioned
over the phone that you'll have to fix at some point when you're back at the
office.

Like all things, you can go to far with todo lists. Todo today lists have
never worked for me. But I'd be lost without a list of appointments and
minor/forgettable actions (filed according to the context in which they need
to be done).

~~~
codinghorror
I did not say or advocate going calendar-less.

The trouble with to-do-ing the minor/forgettable stuff is that, over time, you
end up with a big-ass Katamari ball of minor/forgettable that is kind of
oppressive.

Or you become a slave to getting minor/forgettable things done, out of fear
that they will inevitably overwhelm you -- which they will, since there are
always a zillion minor, forgettable things you _could_ be doing.

Which is worse? I think they're both pretty bad outcomes.

~~~
blvr
Okay, I'm probably making that mistake because I use Todoist as both calendar
and todo list.

There is another option as well as the two you list, which is to remove items
off your list as you can't/don't want to do them. Since I never have any more
than half a dozen items on any of my three calendar/todo lists I never feel
particularly oppressed. But I know that if I didn't have those lists there I'd
be forgetting stuff all the time and letting people down - and I know because
I never used to use a todo list.

------
engtech
For me the advantage of a todo list of adequate size is staying productive in
the face of blocked tasks (eg: the "it's compiling" problem).

I think the real secret is to disable internet access on your dev machine (and
instead keep it in another room), but I find a todo list is all about keeping
in flow by any means necessary and avoiding the subtle allure of the web.

------
aymeric
The problem of most todo apps is that they focus on productivity (do as much
as possible) rather than effectiveness (do the right thing).

Try an app that helps you keep your goals in mind in your everyday workflow.

<http://weekplan.net> (my app) is inspired by the "Put First Things First"
methodology from Covey, and it works for many.

------
speleding
I tried a bunch of TODO and GTD apps and they always took so much time
fidgeting around with that it ended up not being worth it.

Then I tried "Things", and I've been using it ever since. It just has the
right combination of features that do not get in the way if you don't need
them. So it might be just a case of getting something that matches the way you
work.

------
philsheard
Sometimes things pop into your head at the worst time, when you can't do
anything about it. However you collect it (todo list app, email, pen and
paper), making a reminder is the only way not to fail at life.

Real life is too complicated and too important to just forget stuff.

------
pippy
It's a personality thing. Some people work well with todo's, some people
don't.

I work better with them.

------
girlvinyl
Interesting. I really love having my todo list and projects in Omnifocus. It
helps me finish things and relieves a ton of anxiety. For me, using it
actually reduces stress and is pleasant.

------
jiggy2011
I need to make some sort of list or reminder for things that are important but
not urgent.

I lost a domain name to a squatter before because the "RENEW YOUR DOMAIN NOW"
emails ended up in my junk folder.

------
craigvn
Only programmers could argue about the rules of using To Do lists.

~~~
petergx
We're like, philosophers of the mundane.

~~~
npsimons
That's pretty much computer science in a nutshell.

------
photorized
I only write down things that are unpleasant. Don't want them in my brain
cache when I go to bed at night.

Normal "tasks" and creative decisions tend to bubble up and sort themselves
out.

------
outside1234
i think i agree with the sentiment of this, but i still find a "bag of ideas"
interesting to remind me of things that should be on that short list if my
memory fails me.

~~~
codinghorror
I am a fan of research notebooks, for sure, as a general place to put
daydreaming and ideas that might be useful one day.

But a to do list, to me, is something quite different: it is a contract that
This Thing Must Be Done Eventually. I find that this is rarely the case. The
things that "must" be done will get done whether they are on any list or not,
e.g.

What is the most important thing in life?
<http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/03/on-necessity.html>

------
pacomerh
If the article was talking about personal goals, then its spot on. But todo
lists are needed, and they're usually sub-tasks of a greater goal.

------
verroq
If you need a list to remember things. A list is fine. If you need a list to
schedule your life. A list is not fine.

------
smegel
I could not disagree more strongly with this post. For me, managing a todo
list has been the single greatest boon to my own productivity and self-
management I have ever come across.

That is not to say I think most or any todo list applications are worth while
- I think the vast majority of them are really terrible as they are far too
complex or constraining, require too much overhead to do the simple things
like creating a task or changing a task status, are too opinionated about
_how_ you deal with your todo items (like forcing schedules, reminders or due
dates), lack hierarchical structure and lack any kind of free-form input.

The best (and only) worthwhile app that I have ever encountered is not even a
todo list app - it is simply a Google Docs document that I leave open in my
browser on various computers. I use whatever kind of free form structure I
want to dump my thoughts and "todo" things that I feel like at the time - and
annotate task status with free text tags and tokens that suit me as I go.
Various parts of the documents will at times look like todo lists, plans,
schedules, itineraries, work-flows, inventories, idea-lists, collections and
more - and it is constantly evolving as the state of my work and activities
evolve. Important, current stuff goes at the top - for example my first two
blocks are titled "Appointments" (dont want to forget those!) and "Today"
(what do I absolutely need to do today). Going down the blocks tend to reduce
in priority/importance - for example my very last block is called "Learning"
which is a list of various things that I would like to learn more of when I
have time (not that learning isn't important, but it is a long-term background
activity that I don't need to be reviewing every day).

If I have some thoughts or plans that I feel are important, but I dont want to
focus on them now, I will just dump them in the document and move on to
something else. Later I can come back and review that dump, maybe translate it
into actual todo item or evolve it into a planned work-flow. This "thought
dumping" is a well researched (there is a quite famous book about it I
believe) way of self-management and I find it very effective.

The most important thing is there is no structure, form or anything other than
what I impose on myself - you literally get a blank, empty page and _that is
it_.

