I recently had a stressfully large quantity of small tasks to do on a deadline. First, making a list eased the stress -- I had a place to collect tasks as I thought of them, rather than trying to keep them all straight in my head. Second, having a list provides a reward structure: if you get a thing done, you get to tick a box. And then the list is shorter. Some tasks ended up being more complicated -- break it down! I'd make a new subtask, and tick the box.
Todo lists are also highly recommended for people with ADHD for unstimulating, repetitive tasks. Chore sheets, for example, are how my house stays marginally clean. Chores are broken into daily, weekly, and monthly tasks. Again, the best reward is tick the box. The irony here is that I've lived my whole life with ADHD, and it wasn't until my kid struggled with his own ADHD that I learned this incredible hack from his counselor.
Lists are stressors. Unwritten lists are way bigger stressors. When you tick the box the relief is palpable. That said, I don't use apps for this purpose. Pen and paper, a whiteboard, or a laminated printout is best. Because the last thing I need when I'm aiming to finish unstimulating tasks is to interact with a smartphone.
So after I quit with the intention of becoming a software engineer I was trying to find ways to tweak my brain to feel like I was still playing. I ended up programming a daily/weekly list so I could check off items as I did them.. I then added a faux xp bar and gave myself 10xp for dailies and 30 for weeklies. Then it was on. I keep myself in check to not add random bullshit to gain xp from - but using psychological manipulative videogame tactics to keep my brain on track in everyday life has completely changed everything for me.
Throughout all of this I've also returned to videogames in the last few months with a much healthier approach, because now I get my gratification from my real world goals and my need to check off my task list is greater than my need for more pixels. It's made videogames a lot more enjoyable too not focusing on playing past the point they're fun.
I don't find this to be true (in my case) for repeatable tasks like chores. Sure, ticking the box may provide a little relief, but knowing that it has to be done all over again the next week, endlessly, doesn't help with finding satisfaction.
For me, for chores specifically, that sense of motivation comes from a lifetime of past failures. I walked away from a kitchen full of dishes when I moved out of my first apartment, face red in shame, and the landlord ate my deposit. Other friends of mine have had infestations, because their food messes didn't make it back to the kitchen. I saw their cleaning/extermination bills. There is a distinct fear "if I don't manage to break this down into bite-sized pieces, I will suffer XYZ embarrassing/costly consequence" which truly motivates me. And now with a child, "if I don't manage to instil this habit into this child without making it palatable and manageable..."
There are other consequences too -- in-laws induce shame. Other visitors induce shame, but if I have them every other week, the panic-clean before the arrival of in-laws is only slightly bigger than the routine-clean. And with 2 adults and a child with ADHD, messes build fast if we don't stay on top of it.
So when I say ticking the box is it's own reward... really it's the "I'm keeping the monster at bay with the stroke of a pen at the end of 10 minutes of drudgery."
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.
This exchange between HN users replicates conversations my wife and I have, almost to the letter. I suffer from GAD, where she suffers from ADHD, and while our neurodivergences are actively managed, we do notice that they tend to polarize us on certain topics.
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 I've loved using Todo apps in the last year since I started getting medicated for ADHD, but for the past couple months tasks have been accumulating endlessly. I haven't opened my Todoist pinned tab in two weeks.
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.
Yeah, I can definitely see that. For me, the stress differential is between an unquantified problem vs a quantified problem. But with GAD, I can definitely see how the process of quantifying the problem could become its own problem! Really glad for you that you've found balance with your wife!
Fun fact: GAD and ADHD aren't opposites, but quite related. Meaning, you can end up suffering the symptoms of both.
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.
It's super common to have both. It develops naturally from understanding how ADD affects you and stressing about what you might be forgetting or overlooking or whatever now. They can feed on each other. It's easy to imagine how ADD symptoms could develop from GAD.
I was born with ADD, but developed GAD in my 30s in response to living with ADD.
We're talking about the emotions related to the specific format of ticking off tasks in a to-do list. Some people in this thread say they feel a palpable relief, even joy. I feel the opposite. I don't suppose anybody feels so strongly about breathing (except maybe some yogi?).
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.)
For me, those are two different modes of thinking. As in:
Mode 1: I've accepted that chores are something I have to do.
I have "system 2" reasons to be doing them, such as "keeps me in good standing with my spouse", "makes home stay pleasant to be in, as opposed to a biological hazard", or "not doing them will later make me question my status as an adult human being". Those are all "system 2" things though, meaning they provide approximately zero motivation at the moment when I'm attempting, or considering, to do a chore.
What works here is, using "system 2" motivation to refine my TODO list - an activity that is self-rewarding by giving me that "oh I am very smart" feeling. And then, when it's time to do something, having checkboxes to tick provide some immediate reward I can parse "in the moment". Not much, but better than the default, which is no reward at all.
Mode 2: All this is modern recreation of the Sisyphus story.
Chores are a waste of life. It's one of the biggest tragedies of humanity that we haven't yet automated away or designed away the need for maintenance work. Developing self-cleaning, self-maintaining technologies and solutions sounds like a line of work I'd like to be in.
--
The important bit of personal growth for me was to put a force field between those two modes of thinking, so that I can still process thoughts related to Mode 2, without having them interfering with my ability to do anything.
I took a queue from Seth Godin in his book 'This is Marketing' where he basically breaks it down to: People like me do things like this.
I adopted a certain baseline of living as part of my core identity. People like me keep the house clean always, and tidy mostly. People like me remove anything with an odor immediately (50% full trash but it smells? gotta go right now.)
Couple that with the 2 minute rule "if it takes less than 2 minutes do it right now" and it's really changed how I live.
If you're already doing those tasks over and over there is no point in adding them to a todo.
When I started using a todo list I was very conceptual about it "this is something that must be done, therefore it goes on the list.
But really it's more about which tasks need to be present on a list. I don't need to be reminded to eat every day, and if I do, that's the job of an alarm. On the other hand if I need to soak lentils while I make breakfast tomorrow, that might go in my todo list.
> a stressfully large quantity of small tasks to do on a deadline
This is like the ideal use-case for lists and list apps. The list has an endpoint, you can stack tasks up then knock them down. Your progress through the project is actually hill-shaped[1], not "Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill"-shaped.
Haha, I figured some of this out when my son was diagnosed too. My diagnosis came a couple years later.
Lately I’ve been wanting an eink display that generates TODOs for a day based on periodical tasks and my calendar. I’d just stick it on my refrigerator I think, maybe have the option to toggle to a calendar view as well. Time and remembering tasks is such an issue in my family, it seems like it could be a huge help. Unfortunately I’d need to write that program and those displays can be super expensive — I’m not sure when I’ll get the chance.
Doing it with an old iPad would be trivial, but I don’t want my kids to have free access to an iPad on the refrigerator. Plus they burn through batteries, are a bit too obvious, and wouldn’t have the subtle grayscale appearance I’d like to have. It could be an alright way to validate the idea, at least.
This is why I like this site! That’s such a great idea. Here I was thinking about ordering the eink screen component and attaching it to a Pi Zero or something, printing a case for it, etc. This is a much better idea, thanks! Between your comment and another, I think I’ve got perfect short term and longer term solutions.
This is very accurate and partly while I, shameless plug here, built Nestful[0]. Nestful also utilizes periods for tasks, but takes it a bit further by trying to eliminate decision making by allowing you to just do "whatever's next".
Prioritizing a task when adding it is way less stressful than deciding which one to do just before doing it.
Your shamelessness is duly noted. You cannot touch the simplicity of pen and paper. Your app works on a platform plagued by push notifications, which destroys all momentum instantaneously. You describe two points of friction in adding tasks: periods, and priority. I'm sure you have put much thought and care into these features and are justifiably proud of them. Good for you, you did a thing that you cared about.
I need task lists for the things I don't care about, that I'd rather not do. And picking up my phone at any point in that process is completely self-defeating. Having multiple options and do-dads in the task-collecting interface encourages pseudo-productivity in the form of fiddling with the list. In this case, the pen is mightier than the smartphone. If I want priorities, I have multiple colors of pen.
We're all different. Personally I can't do pen and paper.
Writing with a pen makes my hand hurt, and I can't hyperlink to other information that I'll need when addressing a task or easily delegate some task to my partner, especially when travelling.
I prefer tools that get out of my way — and I think Trello is great for this — for me personally, a good electronic TODO list gives me fewer problems than strictly pen and paper would.
If you don't care about it, then pen and paper does seem to be ideal, but smartphones have a major advantage of portability.
For me, every extra object in my life is a source of stress. Something that can be lost, along with all the information, in a list with no cloud sync.
Paper is fine around the house, for non urgent things, that I'll probably remember again next time I actually see the problem I made the list entry about, which is probably a pretty big fraction of the stuff people use lists for. Perhaps I should try a paper list for that one of these days.
But if there's any chance I might want to take something outside.... cloud sync is amazing. It does majorly create a pseudo productivity trap, and a temptation to check a bullshit notification(Made a little more manageable by Keep tiles on a smart watch), and probably is not optimal for getting stuff done.
But it sure is convenient not to have an extra item to carry.
Apps have the advantage of handling lots of tasks and extra stuff. I have my chores in Todoist with various repeating schedules. I think I have almost 100 of them from do every week to once a year. I guess I could make paper lists of the different schedules and then each weekend figure out which ones need to be done, but the app does it for me.
I started carrying my phone with me while doing chores so I could more easily check off tasks. Carrying a piece of paper, or using text document like someone else mentioned, would be less immediate.
> If you don't care about it, then pen and paper does seem to be ideal, but smartphones have a major advantage of portability.
For me, apps are a non-starter because I don't trust them to not collect and sell/exploit my personal info. Even if they insist there's zero telemetry collected because they don't care what types of tasks their users most often use the app for, a change of owner/management can change that situation without notice. The last place I want something like that is in the cloud.
I just assume they all are collecting data, not much that they can use that for besides ad targeting.
I do use Diary(The one of F-Droid) synced with SyncThing for journalling at the moment, to avoid any subconscious censorship I might give myself with a cloud app, but even then, it's not like I'm doing anything super private very often (Although I recognize that there are legitimate reasons to hide things including just not liking spying)
> I just assume they all are collecting data, not much that they can use that for besides ad targeting.
That's far from the truth. Depending on how detailed your task descriptions are. Your health insurance company could track how often you do or don't check your "go to the gym" tasks and if you miss too many days an algorithm could raise your rates since you're living a unhealthy lifestyle. They won't tell you why it happened. You bill will just go up. Your future employers could buy up that data and use it when making hiring decisions. So could a landlord.
Not only are you documenting for them all the things you struggle to do without reminders, but you also give them a list of all the times you've failed. That data could easily come back to haunt you in a court room. It could be used in a custody battle or divorce to show you are undependable and irresponsible. In auto accident if your records show you repeatedly failed to perform maintenance on your car it could make you more liable.
The problem with all the data being collected about you is that you can never know what it will be used for, but you can absolutely be sure that it won't be limited to ads and it will never go away so it can be used against you for the rest of your life.
You'll never know who has access to your data or what will prejudice someone against you. Best to keep as much data out of the hands of others as you can.
The first time I created a checklist in a Trello card, and then completed it … the whole list does this shimmer when you tick the last checkbox. It’s just delightful.
If you use a Kanban system with a 'Done' list and you put a party popper emoji in the title, when you drag the card to it, you get a burst of Confetti :)
Personally I don't see the same relief when ticking a box, but I 100% get the unwritten list. If there is something I need to do that is unscheduled and undocumented, I feel it always takes up a huge portion of my thinking. Writing it down and creating a reminder forces me to at least think about when I will try to do it, and lets me forget about it till that point.
He's not wrong: to-do apps don't provide any sort of motivation. On the other hand, at least for those of us with unreliable memories, lists are essential. However, it is too easy to spend too much time with the lists. They are just a tool, and shouldn't soak up your time.
The trick is to work your own motivation into your workflow "I'll get a coffee when I finish my emails". "When I finish writing this draft, I'll get a beer". "I'm going to slog through this, and then take myself out to dinner". Whatever tickles your fancy.
As for the to-do list: keep it simple. Using a fancy app tempts you to waste time beautifying the list, with categories, priorities, and other unhelpful nonsense. That doesn't get anything done. Personally, I use a simple text document. It auto-opens when I log in. The stuff that needs done first is at the top. Stuff to do "when I have time" accumulates at the bottom. Every few months, I delete stuff that is no longer relevent; otherwise the bottom part would grow forever.
Finally, a last trick, which comes from my wife's PhD advisor. Always end the day with one little, easy task undone. The next day, tackling that easy task helps get you back into a productive mindset. Try it - it really does help!
> The trick is to work your own motivation into your workflow "I'll get a coffee when I finish my emails". "When I finish writing this draft, I'll get a beer". "I'm going to slog through this, and then take myself out to dinner". Whatever tickles your fancy.
I don’t understand this, I have tried it but the willpower trick doesn’t work on me. If I want to do the task I’ll do it and if I want a coffee I’ll get a coffee. Denying myself the coffee when I don’t want to do the task just makes me less caffeinated while I procrastinate and takes almost the same discipline as just doing the task. I have to reason the ”lizard brain” into at least being neutral or ambivalent about doing the task.
I know 'me too' comments are not welcome here, so my justification for this reply is that it highlights an apparent minority of folks here who really struggle with all the standard tools for so-called procrastination and so-called productivity.
I agree about the lizard brain motivation. It seems that checkboxes are a simple shortcut to achieving that motivation for many. They don't work for me, my experience is similar to yours.
I've realised that if I can find something rewarding to enthuse me, then I can tackle a task. And that reward needs to outweigh distractions, it's no good saying I can have two marshmallows later, I'll take one now thanks. So I try to focus on any aspect of a task that I might find rewarding in the present moment, and if I'm lucky it will push competing distractions aside enough that I can get started.
Every. Damn. Course. That I've ever attended has pointed to 'check the boxes' rather than 'find your motivation'. Checking boxes feels like walling myself into a tomb (see other comments in this thread). It's beyond frustrating.
Yeah, doesn't really work for me either - even when I knew that I'd be much happier after completing the task (e.g., cleaning my room), but nope. I'd just sit there, staring at what I had to do, unable to do it. Then I started reading about ADHD and executive dysfunction and it started to explain a lot - at least for me, the task has to be relatively enjoyable in and of itself for me to do it. The prospect of a reward afterwards doesn't change that and doesn't motivate me to do it. Now I take medication and it's made a noticeable difference to how difficult it is to do unenjoyable tasks.
I have the same difficulty: I can't bargain with myself that way and, ultimately, I feel like I'm acting as both a parent and a child at the same time.
I basically won't get something done unless I actually want to, or if there is an element of external accountability, but sometimes I can encourage myself into it if it feels like unburdening myself.
This is why I like Apple's framing of it as "reminders" vs tasks/todos. Also helps me separate my physical journal which is full of tasks, to the app which is for reminders. Functionally identical, yet understood very differently. Reminders becomes an offload of things to remember when the notification hits. Journal becomes a handful of focuses for the day/week rather than a strict "complete all of these or suffer" list.
Some people use calendar to replace how I use reminders, which also works but I find the simple list format of reminders to be far more effective at keeping things simple without restricting to a monthly view. Especially the "all" list!
You're rewarded for doing something with something extrinsic (nice food, money, new toy) or intrinsic (doing the thing makes it rewarding), or punished with something extrinsic (jail, fine) for doing bad things, or intrinsic (guilt, social exclusion).
Incentives and disincentives rule society, learning to harness habits and incentives has helped me improve my life remarkably
If you've figured out something else, I'm sure I'm not the only one curious!
For some people, presumably like OP, rewards and punishments are not motivation; I have anhedonia and a cluster of other problems (including ADHD); rewards do not work because I don't look forward to anything, and punishments do not work because I do not care. Motivation is hard to find.
I'd describe intrinsic rewards as "the thing, in and of itself, is enjoyable" and so if you're motivated primarily by intrinsic rewards, then doing anything that doesn't tickle that part of your brain tends to be somewhere between difficult and impossible and it's often the fear of punishment that finally forces you to do something. This is basically ADHD in a nutshell: can't do the thing because it's not fun, but oh crap the deadline is tomorrow so it must be done now because otherwise failure/get fired/etc.
So it's not so much about incentives or rewards, but that some people are motivated by things that aren't straightforward to control. Can you make unenjoyable tasks enjoyable? Maybe, if you understand that's the issue in the first place, and whatever it is that triggers that for you is something you can add to a task. e.g., a very common ADHD hack is doing something for other people - if you find it difficult to clean just for yourself, but you have guests coming over? Suddenly you're a cleaning machine; or perhaps you struggle to do boring, repetitive tasks in silence but add some music and off you go!
This is, incidentally, what makes being a manager actually challenging. People who are motivated by extrinsic rewards? Probably not super-difficult to motivate (raises, bonuses, public recognition, promotions, etc, are all tools for this). People who are motivated by intrinsic rewards? Well, that's a bit trickier, and I'm not sure what tools a manager would have available to them in this situation.
> People who are motivated by intrinsic rewards? Well, that's a bit trickier, and I'm not sure what tools a manager would have available to them in this situation.
They're not easy, and you don't want a lone wolf on your hands, but you do want to give these types a really long leash so they have the freedom to work on something they do enjoy. Then they'll give it 200%.
These are your rangers, your scouts, your trailblazers; they always seek excitement and there is no taming them for the banality of routine. So harness that by directing them toward experimental/greenfield projects that align with your/company's interests. They're the ones who'll find the new big thing, because they will quit before they allow themselves to get bogged down with yesterday's bullshit work (however critical it may actually be).
Nothing in terms of categories, but many people have "non-standard" coefficients in those mechanisms. Like:
> doing something with something extrinsic (nice food, money, new toy)
Those things are pleasurable and nice, but they don't work for me as a reward unless I can get them in under half an hour or so. My brain won't make the motivational connection between a task and a reward if the delay is larger.
The fundamental reward/motivation mechanism is the same, but it feels like (and I understand it actually is like) the "time discounting" has the exponential factor so large that it effectively becomes a step function - rewards become either "approximately now" or "approximately never".
Yes, this means that most of the things expected of adults are, for me, entirely unrewarding and thus nearly impossible to motivate to do. No, this is not a hyperbole. This is why several people in this thread are swearing to the motivational value of ticking a check box, and why I'm joining them in this - for a lot of mundane, daily tasks, ticking off a box is the only reward our brains can process.
(Sometimes the check box may work as a crutch, allowing enough successes in a row on an activity to let the brain pick up on a slightly more distant reward, and/or just habituate. This is, kid you not, how I had to re-habituate brushing my teeth a couple times in my life. Ain't ADHD great.)
Yeah, the only other motivation I get is something like excitement or curiosity, which is what motivates me to work on my art, but for me it does not tend to work for anything but making art.
The problem with to-do lists is that they get to be huge, way more than you can do in a reasonable day, and seeing a long and ever-growing list of tasks that you can never finish creates stress and inhibits your motivation.
The mind hack to avoid this problem is to consider your to-do list to be a "pantry" that contains everything you could work on. At the beginning of each day, open your pantry and choose the few items you want to get done that day. Then close the pantry and don't look at it again.
Just work off the small list of items for that day. You can even write it down on paper, which makes it very satisfying to strike off each completed task. At the end of the day, return any unfinished items to the pantry, and throw the paper away.
With Spaced Repetition memory tools, people add everything they want to remember, then skip some days of reviewing, and then there are mountains of entries "the system wants me to review". The system is only reflecting the ongoing effort cost of keeping that many facts in memory. Review them, or risk forgetting them, is the choice. TODO lists have way more than you can do because you put that much in them. That doesn't sound like a problem with to-do lists, anymore than "I bought more books than I can read" is a problem with books; it sounds victim-blamey but it's not books' fault that you bought them.
Avoiding a todo list lets you forget about some things and thus not do them without having to explicitly make the decision to not do them. That feels better, easier, but I'm not sure it actually is better - shouldn't making a conscious decision what to prioritise and what to forget lead to a better outcome?
> it sounds victim-blamey but it's not books' fault that you bought them.
It sounds that way because you are putting the responsibility in the wrong place. To-do list apps advertise certain benefits. If huge swaths of people don’t actually get the benefit, that’s the to-do list failing to live up to its promise, at least for that group. If some app offered to help you organize your books and the end result was people ending up with tons of books, yeah you can kinda blame the app.
The benefits they advertise are that they won't forget your to-do list, and that they offer tools to help you organise (sort, filter, tag, assign priorities) to your entries - not that they will help you do the tasks or that they will tell you what things you shouldn't be doing and help you reject them, right?
I don't see those as contradictions; it's a common idea to write things down so that you can get them out of your head and stop thinking about them, stop stressing about remembering all the things you have to do today; that can be the 'calm' and 'mental clarity' Todoist is advertising. Become focused, organized, plan your day, manage your projects are basic offerings of any organizing tools. It's also an idea[1] that writing down your goals crystallises them and helps you actually do them.
Note that they don't say "Todoist helps you do more than you could without it", or "Things will tell you what to accomplish in life" or "Things can get there for you" or "Todoist helps reach calm by forcing you to do less overall". It's possible to 'reach mental clarity' by dropping all your todos on the floor and going to live as a monk; mental clarity doesn't mean "do everything you want to do".
It would be different if they were advertising something like "By using Todoist you will do 150 todo items per day, 50% more than other todo lists, or your money back", or "Things lets you double the amount of things you can accomplish in life".
> "If some app offered to help you organize your books and the end result was people ending up with tons of books, yeah you can kinda blame the app."
You can't; if you have a huge pile of books, and then you start using the Dewey Decimal System to organize them, is it now the Dewey Decimal system's fault that you bought so many books before you started using it? Is it the DDS' fault if you decide that you can have more books, now they're organized, even though you already knew you had too many to read before starting to use it and you misthought the problem was organization rather than quantity?
You’ve got tunnel vision or you’re playing word games or something. I’ve quoted very straightforward claims from two app sites. Lots of people find that these apps don’t live up to the claims for them. They don’t find clarity, they don’t find calm, they don’t get more done, they don’t get organized. The apps do not actually help. Hypotheticals of monks or any research covered in a Forbes article does not change that.
The point of the “left handed scissors” in the post is that sometimes it’s not that you’re doing it wrong, it’s that you have the wrong tool. You can argue with someone having trouble cutting with scissors who is left handed, or you can help them find left handed scissors. When the packaging says “Helps you cut paper faster with ease” and 13% of the population doesn’t experience that, you also can push back on the product a bit.
I'm not playing word games; you're shifting goal posts. You started saying it's the app's fault people put too many things into them. That's what I'm objecting to.
You're now changing that to "apps don't give you the benefits they promise - notably, calmness, clarity, a feeling of being organized". It's possible to have an overloaded Todo app and still be calm, calmly saying "I have too many things to do, good thing I have them nicely organised in this app so I can clearly see that it's too much and choose which ones to deprioritise". It's also possible to be stressed from having too many things to do. Or to have nothing to do, and still be stressed. I would happily agree that the advertising is trying to sell people on a calmness the app can't necessarily deliver, and if you say people aren't getting the calm they wanted, I can agree with that, - but that's a different dimension to how many things you chose to do and whether the app promised to put realistic limits on the amount of things you can do, or encouraged you to add more more more increasing the overall amount of things you wanted to do.
There probably is an effect where writing letters by hand is slow, a typewriter helps you write them more quickly, so it encourages you to write more letters - but if you didn't have more letters that you wanted to write, then you wouldn't write more letters, you'd just finish the ones you planned more quickly. The typewriter can't tell you whom to write to, or what you want to say, it can't encourage you to write more letters overall. If you want to write more letters than you can type in a day, that isn't the typewriter's fault. In that sense, a Todo app helps you keep track of more things, so implicitly encourages you to put more things in it, but if you don't have more things to do, you won't do that.
At the end of the day your Todo list can be a piece of paper and it feels fundamentally wrong to blame the paper for you having too many things to do, regardless of whether you are calm or have clarity or feel organized or not. You can't choose more things than you can possibly do, write them down, then blame the writing. The book organising system mentioned earlier, you can blame it if the books aren't organised after using it and it's a rubbish system and you can't find what you are looking for quicker than remembering where it is yourself, you can blame it if it promised to handle 1000 books but fails after 200. But you can't blame it that you have 1000 books, and you certainly can't blame it that you would have to read 5 books a day every day to get through your backlog before you die and that's impossible.
> You're now changing that to "apps don't give you the benefits they promise - notably, calmness, clarity, a feeling of being organized".
My first comment.
> To-do list apps advertise certain benefits. If huge swaths of people don’t actually get the benefit, that’s the to-do list failing to live up to its promise, at least for that group.
Seems like pretty steady goal posts.
I think we’re focusing on different things, what’s possible versus what happens. It’s possible to have a chef’s knife made of wood and cut vegetables with it. It’s just probably a pretty awful knife.
I said TODO lists have too much in them because you put too much in them, and "it sounds victim-blamey but it's not books' fault that you bought them.". You replied quoting that part of what I said and saying I'm putting the responsibility in the wrong place, which suggests you think the responsibility for "having too many things to do" or "having too many books" lies with the system a person is using, not with the person?
If you don't think that, we are talking at cross purposes. But if you do think that, talking about calmness, clarity, feeling organised, doesn't support that position. And on those parts I agree that TODO lists can overpromise and underdeliver (or can't deliver at all, ever).
I was mostly interested in the idea that when keeping todo items in your head you will naturally spend more time thinking about the ones you find important and interesting, and there will be a natural forgetting of the ones you don't find important or interesting without you having to choose to reject any of them - and putting them in any kind of system forces you to face how many there are and now you can't naturally forget and the system will not forget them. I only put the victim blaming part in to avoid people ignoring the main point and replying "sounds like victim blaming" "you're holding it wrong".
> ever-growing list of tasks that you can never finish creates stress and inhibits your motivation
Is an actual thing. Our brain gets overloaded that way while it keeps track of tasks in the background, requiring energy and memory. Writing stuff down helps, but it's still _there_.
You actually have to cross it out or clearly discriminate ideas and actual tasks you want to do and can do within a reasonable time frame.
I like to separate out projects from tasks. For me, project is something that requires multiple tasks to complete. I have Trello boards for tracking projects in various areas of life. I will only put tasks in todo list for projects that I'm doing. I will keep checklist of tasks that need to be done for each projects if want to work out in advance.
This system is great for tracking house projects since there is always a large number of them. It is also good for planning things for the future, I have lists of plants to get in the fall.
The problem I have with this system is that I have enough regular tasks that don't pick up many projects. I also don't run the process for syncing tasks frequently enough. I wish they were all in one system.
I use this method and I want to highlight another advantage, besides shortening a huge list into a small, manageable amount. It allows you to pick the tasks for the day based on the current context. How much time do I have in the day (e.g., do I have a lot of meetings scheduled or not), what are the most important/urgent tasks at the moment, what is my energy level, and so on.
The only TODO app that actually works for me and is super, duper simple is this:
Make a calendar event. Make it repeat just often enough to be annoying. If necessary (e.g., taxes) make a couple more that are much more forceful with their language near an actual deadline.
That's it. When you're done, delete the repeating calendar thing.
It feels awesome deleting an infinite set of repeating events in the future. It's essentially self-induced negative reinforcement on a platform you cannot really ignore as an adult working in technology.
> It's essentially self-induced negative reinforcement on a platform you cannot really ignore as an adult working in technology.
I have tried this, but it flirts with a worse outcome: alarm fatigue. If I start ignoring one task, that risks bleeding over to another task. If I reflexively snooze "call mom" today then the chance that I snooze "write report" tomorrow is nonzero. Which, like you say, is unworkable as an adult in tech.
For me, physical notes work better than electronic ones. Push notifications are a pox on productivity, and I find that if I limit their use to (would-be) emergencies, they're super effective. But if they become noise, my entire computer risks turning into a work-free zone.
Because of alarm fatigue, I avoid adding TODOs to the calendar that are not real TODOs. Something like "write report" I don't really need on my calendar. I know I need to do it. I'm talking with the client. Etc.
Something like "[Friend name] should be back from [place name] by now. Call him!" matches it better. The type of things that would otherwise slip by.
I actually do put things like "write report" in my calendar, because it's a task I dislike. I try to find a specific-sized gap between meetings, where I'm already paying the cost of context switching. That helps me get the task done in a timely fashion, where it isn't in contention with the much more interesting deep work that I consider my "real job."
I actually just "ignore" phone notifications.
At any given moment, there's a dozen of them on my phone, and if a new one pop-up, I just let it stay there with the rest.
I only allow a few apps to present notifications on my phone so when one appears, it’s because I want it. I may decide to snooze it but I never just ignore it as a routine event.
Most apps have too many events to be worth notifications. Looking at you Slack. Those are better handled by a periodic polling rather than push notifications.
> I only allow a few apps to present notifications on my phone so when one appears, it’s because I want it. I may decide to snooze it but I never just ignore it as a routine event.
My phone notifications were useless until I did the same.
Deny notification access by default and "poll" your inbox/chats/etc with a calendar reminder 1, 3, or 5 times per day.
It's actually the only thing that worked for me. I have a natural skill at deconstructing complex things, and my hunch is this the main reason I never enjoyed todo lists, even though if a task is extremely complex I have to break it down in a written format to offload the overhead, but I usually use mindmaps instead of todo lists because of their "non-linear" characteristics.
I do believe calendar worked better for me because I'm not operating over "tasks" but over "time blocks". This way I'm more efficient, and I'm progressively getting better at estimating how much time I need to allocate for a specific task. It's a broader perspective than the atomic "task" and it feels more intuitive to me to operate at this layer. HBR has a great article that discusses some of the things I said (https://hbr.org/2012/01/to-do-lists-dont-work).
I also don't believe that "Willpower needed to make decisions is a limited resource.", (and in the context) is one reason why todo lists are weighing one down.
"Needless to say, meditating requires a lot of self-discipline. But is it the kind of self-discipline that gets consumed as a resource?
At first, that answer seemed obvious to me: the longer a meditation session went on, the more willpower I’d need to resist the urge to quit and go do something else. My back and legs would hurt, so I’d want to change my posture. I’d want to daydream about something else, engage in a little mental theatre imagining this scenario or that one. Yet—according to the technique—whenever this happens you’re to remind yourself you’re here to work and shift your focus back onto something happening right now.
As the days wore on, however, I started to notice something about my own self-discipline that seemed to contradict the resource metaphor. Sitting still and doing meditation was hard, but it was hard to the degree to which I was somewhere else. If my attention was fully focused on what I was doing, and not on, say, thinking to myself about how long this will last and when I’ll be free, the act got a lot easier. The longer attention was paid to the meditation without these interruptions, the easier it got.
This suggests a very different model of willpower, one based on attention and mental habit patterns, instead of a consumable resource."
> 1. [...] You want to postpone a task? Please enter the exact date to postpone this to. Which project to add this to? Tags? Subtasks? The amount of things one can customize is really large, but making all this decisions has a cost
and also
> 5. Tasks are not the same. Get milk, write an essay, plan a vacation, reconnect with a friend. These are things of different magnitude, different emotional connection, different context and time commitment. Some tasks aren’t even tasks, e.g. simply items to keep track of or be reminded of. But TODO apps treat them the same. They get the similar looking rows neatly organized in a unified interface.
Obviously, combining 1 and 5 you have all the more issues relating to the need to make decisions between your different task categories, should you choose to manage that aspect too...
In all, the pain with TOOD apps/lists (for me) is not "getting the list done". It's actually "making and maintaining the list". What to put in the list? What not to put? When to update? What kind of details? What sources - Slack, emails, discussions, meetings, ideas? The overhead of just making/maintaining the list is what kills it.
So my take on this is that people try to organize themselves to death.
They take TODO app and think it will help them become next Bill Gates - just like waking up earlier or reading more books.
Problem is waking up earlier or reading more books and so TODO apps won't do anything for you.
TODO app will help you achieve a goal if you first have a goal and something real not like "become rich" and then you start putting in "get milk, write essay".
Don't put getting milk on your todo list.
Try to write an essay - well put steps or things you have to read first to write an essay, let's say you write an essay on Seneca, well obviously your todo should contain:
- read on shortness of life by Seneca
- read Seneca wiki page and take notes
- read Seneca wikiquotes page and take notes
- write an outline
- write out first paragraph introducing reader to Seneca based on wiki page notes
- write out paragraph on "On Shortness of Life"
If you have clear goal todo list is useful, if you want to manage your whole life and maintain it in todo app - that is not doable.
Lol. I don't need a todo app to remind me to work on my side projects. I need a todo app to make sure I have paid the bills to payees that refuse automated payment methods, to ensure I know the 20 or so important dates related to my kids school for things like speech dates (date that it needs to be handed in, date that the speech is done), homework, and things like tablets the dogs need to take, and tax return stuff, planning holidays, the 3 or 4 steps (that need to be done in a specific order) for car insurance renewal, 7 DIY jobs to be done around the houses ... and so on. Of course I could try to hold it all in my head and just do the thing, or whatever.
Ah, it's the "just do things" part of time management discussions. It's a good perspective to have as part of the discussion, as they too often lead to talking about time management tools more than actual doing things.
It emphasizes time measurement (track how much time you're spending actually doing the work) rather than time management (plan when you intend to do the work).
I think the measurement focus is useful as you will naturally react to the measurement and that will affect your behaviour.
But planning when you intend to do the work also means planning what you will do in what sequence (i.e. prioritization), and taking into account external constraints.
And those things are absolutely essential when you constantly have more things to do than you can finish in one day, and with interdependencies on other people's work.
Preferring "actually doing the work" on stuff that is easy to finish because that is encouraged by your measurement could be quite disasteous，if it causes you to delay more important things, or to fail to address things that block other people.
At that level I wonder if the measured time is even useful. I'd imagine myself just looking at the commited code/specs done at the end of the day and assert if it was productive or not.
I think the argument is that there are still unexplored Todo app models out there. For me, I think the ideal Todo app is probably a WhatsApp-style interface with one or more AI personalities helping me achieve one or more goals e.g. a side project partner, a gym buddy, etc.
Bingo. The ultimate 'todo app' will be when everyone has an AI assistant. "You mentioned in the meeting last week you would respond to Bill by Tuesday, and you have not done that yet. Here is a suggested response to get you started."
ChatGPT meets Clippy... What would be even more useful is if that AI could receive unspoken queues/feedback and it "understood" human behavior. Sometimes it's just not a good time for an assistant to cut in and remind you of something.
I want to ask an AI questions like "I have 30 minutes of free time at home, what tasks can I complete?" and it'd give a relevant answer taking into account the weather and time of day automatically.
So that it wouldn't suggest yard work during a lightning storm or drilling at midnight. =)
I'd actually pay a monthly subscription to a service like that, especially if it could ingest my personal data (calendar, email, todo-lists) securely.
This article encompasses lots of the reasons why I dislike traditional todo apps as well.
Unlike the author I did end up creating my own solution which solves a lot of the problems suggested by using a tree structure instead of a list structure. I have found it works better for my productivity than any other app as it encourages breaking tasks down into smaller chunks which are then easy to complete and build momentum as OP suggests.
I also did this. I decided after a few false starts that I was simply never going to commit to use a todo system that someone else made, so I wrote my own.
The tree-of-tasks idea is great and exactly what I did.
I probably won’t ever release it since I’m under no delusions that I’m creating something novel, but I love seeing how others approach the problem and taking ideas to incorporate into my system.
I made it integrate with my PS1 variable so that it's useful from the terminal; my terminal prompt includes the current task, the same way it includes the git branch.
(There's a GUI I'm working on too, at the moment).
Got hugged to death? 404 now.
Edit: lol, did you implement a referral block from HN at the JS level...? That seems silly, you've already sent the data...
The innovation is modelling projects as a tree that can be broken down into smaller chunks. You can nest as deeply as you like and therefore break down even the most complex ideas into actionable steps.
That's what I used to do too. It works great but I wrapped it up in an app for myself so that I could include scheduling, favouriting to plan my day and some other UX enhancements over a .txt file.
The issue with app apps is that are isolated stuff, we have a single brain, we need integration. That's why I live in Emacs, where org-mode alone can integrate next to anything.
A simple example, jut note about a payable bill due before a certain date:
- we need the bill, for instance a pdf file
- perhaps the email where so send a payment confirmation to be polite
- a note with the date and the amount
- annotating after the payment the payment reference from the bank
- ...
Only in an integrated system such simple task can be done. No isolated todo app can.
With org-mode capture templates[0], the OP could make a single command where they implement their 13 steps for each task as a template that expands to a task with the thirteen subtasks predefined.
With further plumbing they could even have several different templates for the different types of tasks they regularly have such as those small every day tasks which don't need 13 standard subtasks.
Every wonder of the world was built without todo apps. Every enduring work of literature, every renaissance painting, every leap forward in sanitation and medicine, every architectural triumph, every breakthrough in our understanding of the cosmos, every great expedition, every moon landing. All these achievements involved organisation and planning – including breaking things down into lists of tasks – but I bet very few of them involved people fretting about how to redesign their lists to be more 'motivating'.
The modern notion that we can derive enduring motivation from the design of a list-making methodology, if only we could find the winning formula, is insane. Motivation comes from beholding the intended achievement itself. If you don't want to carry out a task, either the task is not in service of a worthwhile goal, or it is but you are failing to notice that.
> All these achievements involved organisation and planning – including breaking things down into lists of tasks – but I bet very few of them involved people fretting about how to redesign their lists to be more 'motivating'.
Are you sure that is the case? The origins of the term Akrasia date to biblical times; it's clear many people struggled with motivation for certain type of work back then.
> The modern notion that we can derive enduring motivation from the design of a list-making methodology, if only we could find the winning formula, is insane. Motivation comes from beholding the intended achievement itself.
Unfortunately, specialization of labor works directly against that. Few people assemble the final pieces to behold the achievement; everyone else is toiling at things that go into things to support people making things that go into other things, etc.
> If you don't want to carry out a task, either the task is not in service of a worthwhile goal, or it is but you are failing to notice that.
Indeed, but "failing to notice that" isn't something trivial, and for great many people, the failure to notice (or rather, the failure to feel, because noticing at the intellectual level is by itself not motivation) has a biological cause.
Not sure about the apps. I just use GTD on paper using a paper agenda combined with a binder to store everything. The main benefit is not having to remember everything that has to be done. When I was younger I found it very unpleasant to have all of these things in my head all the time. Then I discovered GTD and never looked back. As remarked in the article, not everything that comes in gets done. Once every so often it is a good idea to purge tasks that have been in there for quite a bit of time and still did not get done.
Call me an old school but this is how I keep track of things. Everyday morning, I start my day with writing on a notebook ( yes, a hard paper notebook ) with the title “things to do” and write top 3-4 times I would like to finish it. Be it work or personal, don’t matter. All goes there.
At the end of the day, I check how many I have finished and repeat it again next day. No stats, no achievement feelings except the sense of satisfaction I get that I am doing things that needs to be done
After many years of using all systems in place, I use a mixed of several stats:
- every week, I print my calendar for the week
- I used a chat thread to myself for notes
- long term stuff goes into productivity apps (todos, cals, etc)
This means I most of my organization on the paper sheet, and only a few minutes on apps, to basically sort things out and put what's important back on paper.
It's more satisfying, it's faster, more flexible, and for some reason, manipulating something on paper commits me more than on screen.
It also don't run out of battery, can be read in the sun, and has no start up time, no clicks.
After trying almost everything I can imagine (probably twice) to manage my tasks and time I found the sweetspot from hybrid model of digital and analog. The system is rather simple: I write stuff to the paper (home and work) and then take a picture/scan with my phone. I use the appropriate cloud provider app depending on the context. Files are stored in chronological order.
I keep the current state on paper and whenever I need I just cleanup notes to the cloud and shred the papers.
The beauty of this is that I think I have finally got back the time that all these tools took from me. It was much simpler than I thought.
I do something similar for notes: I have an A4 whiteboard I basically always have with me at home. I pace around a lot while thinking and love writing on a physical something. Most ideas are short term, and can be erased, but for anything else, I snap a picture of the whiteboard.
Notes apps are laughably terrible, I hate limiting my stream of consciousness to a one dimensional line of characters. Worse is trying to do it with two thumbs on a smartphone.
I also think that storing everything with some arbitrary tag/folder model enforces the misconception that everything that was once created is equally important. Notes/todo apps don’t really address this.
I've personally found that I was "holding it wrong" when it comes to TODO apps. I think everyone likely has a slightly different approach to personal productivity that works best for them, but here are some insights that helped me:
1. Finding the right time scale: some people plan out their entire day, some their week, etc. For me, planning at a monthly timescale is more appropriate.
2. Don't use TODOs for chores and habit tracking. At first, I tried using todo apps to also track stuff like chores or hobbies I wanted to pursue daily. For me, this had the negative effects of making my chores take up even more brain space (now I not only have to do the chore but I actually have to mark it as done etc) and turning hobbies into a deadening "do it because you must" sort of obligation instead of a fun pursuit. It turns out I was getting these things done anyway so they weren't a good fit for a todo app which in this case just increased overhead for no reason.
3. It's important to recognize what counts as a concrete task and what sort of projects are more general, free form creative endeavors that it may not be worth it to squeeze into an itemized todo list. For me, many of the actual todos I have are temporal events, so what I really needed was a calendar. For my creative projects, I do a lot better when I actually don't constrain myself with a todo list.
So, in the end, I've settled on using a calendar to track important tasks I need to do each month (usually "life admin" type stuff) and that's it. I found that everything else was way too fine grained to be useful.
I use Sublime as my TODO app, just a text file. I have too much context switching at my job and I can't remember everything. Say, I'm doing a code review for 1 hour and during that time, several people from HR, QA, devs, etc. message me or approach me in person about something important (or not). So I just write it down and forget about it, because I'm busy doing my code review. I could've used some ticketing system but it's too much work to create an issue, add proper description, deadlines etc. compared to just quickly appending a line to a text file. In the evening and in the morning I inspect the list, prioritize it, and often I just delete entries if there were added long time ago and I did nothing about them (because of priorities). If it's something critical, people will definitely message me again. It's worked well for the past 5 years. I've tried various apps but nothing beats the flexibility of a simple text file.
I use a pile of paper and pen next to my desk. It’s my TODO and also my random idea dump. Sometimes all of the tasks get finished and the ideas executed and checked off. Other times they languish. Eventually I crumple up the ones that have been collecting dust too long and toss them in the recycling bin. If it sat around forgotten for that long it wasn’t important. My goal is to augment the information filtering and prioritization neural network that sits behind my forehead, not fight against it by imposing artificial constraints, categories or rigidity on it. Just as important as retaining and acquiring information is letting go of useless info.
To a great extent I feel the same about working in a team. I’ve found that a team of 3-8 people with a well aligned vision doesn’t need to track tasks or assign priorities. Especially when there is good guidance from above on the longer term vision. I’ve seen these tools used as duck tape for the wrong team, team size, product vision, etc.
> I’ve made a list of strategies to help me get things done, and ended up with 13 items (things like “extract the next smallest step as a separate task” or “work on it for just 2 minutes”)
I like the app (or webpage) Workflowy. It uses bullet lists which resonates very well with my way of structuring things. I also find it better to do weekly plans than daily or context based and then just move unfinished tasks to the next week, should they not be completed. If they hang around for too long, I just delete them.
That said, I do feel that too often especially us computer users are able to conflate the tool for the work because the tool is just so damn interesting.
Todo apps are really just particular versions of what sells to people who are looking for todo apps. If you're a GTD nut like myself, you buy OmniFocus 2.0 and never really use it properly. Or if you're a computer nut like myself, you move EVERYTHING including the calendar to emacs. Or if you're a psychology nut like myself you might get really into AutoFocus (or one of it's four iteration, the last version called 'Final Version Perfected') because it's simple and sounds really considerate. There's been a few others, sometimes with a personal wiki attached, sometimes not.
As a fellow GTD nut, I totally can remember how I would buy all of these office supplies and task management applications because, while I did not yet have GTD to actually give me a systematic approach to actually do anything useful with them, I knew that I was inattentive when I didn't want to be, had too many interests and could not remember them all, and therefore was buying all of this equipment and software in hopes that it would magically teach me what to do with it.
Just breaking down and following GTD step by step has worked for me to now have a menu of options I can do, and the only things that are considered to do in an official sense are list entries that have a due date on them.
I have dozens maybe hundreds of items on my at home next action items list, but I only really see the seven or so that have a due date on them as being to do, everything else is something that I could do if I wanted to do in the context of at home.
That modified form of having next action items be on the proper context list and yet be treated like a someday maybe is the formula that worked for me and sustains me when I'm doing this GTD stuff.
I would like to respond point by point to the article with a GTD apologetic, but my comment is too long already so I will spare the web.
> That said, I do feel that too often especially us computer users are able to conflate the tool for the work because the tool is just so damn interesting.
This happens a lot generally. People confuse meetings with work or planning with work. It's end up being another type of bike shedding.
To your point, I have bounced around a few different apps and settled Apple Reminder.app for recurring things or things that have to be done on a date and a simple Kanban board for everything else.
I use plain text documents for todos because what actually works for me keep changing over time as I find new and incentive way to avoid what is on them, and so todo apps have never worked well for me because I keep having to change them.
There are some overall approaches that keep working for me. E.g extract a few of the most urgent tasks and move them to the top; if I don't feel like doing any, try to split a few tasks into smaller sub tasks; try to set a schedule with specific times to do specific tasks.
Usually one or more tactics will work to get me going any given day, but it's not a given which ones so I keep cycling between things.
> Willpower needed to make decisions is a limited resource. And most TODO apps are lazy and don’t consider the impact on your willpower. You want to postpone a task? Please enter the exact date to postpone this to. Which project to add this to? Tags? Subtasks? The amount of things one can customize is really large, but making all this decisions has a cost.
Most/all odo tasks presume that precision of intent is a good thing. Priorities and flags. Can't I just make a new task and then drag it into a 2-D canvas somewhere to get an idea of how important / urgent / time-consuming / focus-demanding it is ?
google keep - me and my wife - shopping list - best thing ever. Everyone adds what's missing and once a week when we do the shopping we buy whatever is in that list. very convenient. I have other lists but not using them too much, like movies to watch with release date.
> Sense of accomplishment is important but rare in the digital world. When you mark a task as done in your TODO app, it just hides it.
That's actually what I look for in a to-do app. I don't want gamification, I don't want a 'completed' list: that incentivises adding stuff to the list you've done or are about to do anyway, to make sure you have the record. It's like step-counting or Strava, I'm sure some are unaffected by it, but others are annoyed if the record's incomplete.
I have a list of completed TODOs dating back to July 20, 2020. I keep a running, open TODO list in the Notes app on my Mac, check things off throughout the day as I finish them, and close out the day's completed items that night or the next morning. (or sometimes a few days later when life dictates that I have other priorities.)
Sometimes the completed todo lists are as simple and profound as recording the birth of my son. Other times, they capture a dozen or more mundane tasks that I needed to track and complete in a single day.
Either way, I find satisfaction in manually clearing out the previous day's completed TODO items, and have found that keeping track of daily tasks in this way makes it incredibly easy (if a bit time-consuming) to write year-end self-evaluations of my job performance. I regularly forget about several major projects that I was involved in, and only remember by dint of my TODO lists.
I should add that I use the Notes app because it's installed on—and syncs across—every computing device I use, and because my wife is happy to use it too, so we can share some TODO lists, like groceries or house chores.
The major limiting factor for me getting something done is facing a massive list, or worse, an empty list with a massive project as the title. “Get new job - 0 subtasks”.
I begrudgingly stick with OmniFocus because it’s extremely effective at hiding things from me until I could actually do it, but it’s probably the most robotic solution I could think of haha. I’m at least a little more likely to try breaking something down if I don’t have to look at the massive list until things are relevant.
Kind of ties into #7, but one thing every task manager is missing something to keep the completed task… artefacts? Like 80% of the tasks I have end up with some sort of digital receipt, let me keep those in there too. You could even reference artefacts in other tasks as a way to hide them until you have the artefact from some prior task(s). Easy way to reference things.
Point #2 was the reason we made our todo app. It was amazing how many apps had due dates but not do dates. Today you should see the tasks that you WANT to do, and not ALL your tasks, and definitely not just the tasks that MUST be done by today.
The rest of the points are solid as well. Dealing with the downward spiral is the most challenging and interesting. I personally always solved this by putting my head in my wife's lap and talking through it. This is not scalable, so our solution is a "procrastination wizard" that walks you through getting started when you're in a downward spiral. We've gotten good feedback that it's helped people recover from spiraling, so there's definitely hope for solving this with a tool, and I think an LLM could be a good solution here!
In the end the worst part for me is that the amount of effort it takes to organise my tasks is enough that I barely have the energy to actually do the tasks afterwards
Now, the only thing I really use TODO apps for are shopping lists or packing lists
Hah my wife has tried dozens of todo apps, inevitably landing back on pen and paper. I’m building an app for her now with a surprising number of the features this author wants! Maybe I should put it into the App Store after all!
The main feature is actually exactly what this article mentions - items do not disappear when you check them off, instead they strike-through (working on an animation and haptic feedback for this!). There are small celebrations when items are completed, and there is a calendar for tracking how often tasks are done or left undone. All actions (ie: clicking a todo or snoozing a todo) are written to a local database, so analytics are possible. Export to google docs is a wife-requested feature.
There are some AI things, ie: it's setup for me to write code to let chatGPT suggest TODOs or recommend changes to todo lists, but to be honest I haven't gotten too deep in the weeds with AI stuff yet - mostly been focused on UI/UX which is difficult for me as a devops engineer!
What people actually need is a diary. I can easily go through a day's worth of work and not remember what I did for that day, what I wanted to do nor what I was thinking about. TODOs is a weird middle ground where you put some effort but it doesn't have enough return to make the effort worthwhile. If you actually write a diary and jot down your thoughts, dreams, wishes etc you can actually relive it and rediscover things.
I started doing this and it feels incredible when you start reading back what you did the past week and rediscover all the victories, thoughts that you had throughout the week.
I find using mind map tools far better - perhaps a combination of the two? A mind map where nodes have a timestamp for completion along with a bunch of connected dependencies. All visually presented in a unified UI.
There's this desire for Vannevar Bush's memex that is preyed on by to-do, note, and mind map apps. None of them scratch the itch, because data entry sucks, and data entry isn't even the problem.
Free yourself from the trap. Writing stuff down will not make you more productive. Only doing stuff will. You can only do one thing at a time. How much planning do you need to do one thing right now? The planning is an excuse. Just pick something and do it, and you'll already be ahead of every single person fiddling with to-do apps.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. I'm working on an open source AI project, and I use a kanban board for two things: items I know I'm likely to forget, and items I've completed already when I enter them. I get no value from writing down reminders to do the things I know I need to do, but having a short list of important reminders (eg reproduce and resolve an edge case bug) along with a list of accomplishments has been helpful and motivational
When I need to perform a task in the immediate future (now or a couple of minutes/hours from now) I add a line. When I finish it I tick it and it goes away. I don't need more.
I also use this when I'm about to sleep but got enough motivation to stand up and write a task to fix/try tomorrow.
And also works for notes when you need to paste/jot something immediately.
I haven't seen anyone mention that you can keep a well featured todo list in a markdown file. My todo list setup is to have a todo.md open in VSCode along with the markdown extension (which has a shortcut for marking off `- [ ]` items - and automatically adding a new box when I newline!).
I also have a ~10 line python script that copilot helped me write to add days as H1 headers (literally just `# Tuesday (2023-07-18)`) to save me from doing that bit manually.
I find TODO list (org-mode for me) useful when I have lots of small tasks that need doing, and I like that I have a record of what I've accomplished (good for when I have to write my performance evaluation). But for projects with bigger scope, I only do so in an adhoc way, e.g. as a comment in my code, reminding me to implement x, y or z.
Systematizing my whole work life around a system? meh. more of a performance art than life hack.
TODO apps do not work for me unless they are short lived, like shopping list when you go for an errand. If a task stay on a todo list for too long that mean it is just too low priority to be worth staying on the list.
I need to work in short sprints. If a task is on a todo list it must be done in a week and that's it, otherwise if it can't be completed in the week, it needs to be put in a calendar for a few weeks/months later.
"TODO lists will grow and demotivate you" seems to be the theme here.
I just recently created a Trello board and I broke it up into the Backlog (that's the big one), and then I have a column for EACH day. I drag no more than 3 (usually 2) tasks for each day column. There is really no more than that you will usually get done. It's been very effective.
I also have a special Backlog column for Recurring tasks, which have their own color.
LLMs are interesting here - since they can handle ambiguity, there's the potential for user-centric interface, no matter how you work.
My partner built TaskML, a plugin for ChatGPT which means todos are managed in chat, as you go. It's been interesting to consider how it changes the way I plan my work, and reflect on it. I'm still trying to figure out how to improve on a long list that can get overwhelming though.
I keep banging this drum. I want my TODO system to be a data lake, not a data warehouse.
I want to write down things to do, useful resources, thoughts, etc. as quickly as possible. I dont want to structure this data. I just want to write it without barrier and once im done with the task Ill probably never see it again so any time spent organizing is a waste.
I have folders with the issue number and a md file with my notes.
I think David Allen acknowledges this - his book focuses on the mechanics of how to execute and doesn't talk enough about his planning processes - how to make sure that what's on your task list lines is to your life / year / month goals.
His book does touch on that but not in enough depth - that's not what anyone takes away. I think he gets to that in another book of his.
Agree with everything said in the article. The problem is two-fold IMO:
a) As the article states, different task categories (work/personal) are evaluated the same way by apps, when they have different benefits and costs (emotional attachment, friction, etc.)
b) People building these apps startwith the scaffolding of an enterprise time-tracking app, and any design decisions that come after that are constrained by that original choice.
After reading "Atomic Habits", I tried a bunch of iOS habit trackers and none of them worked for me. They often wanted me to log in, had a social component, a game, analytics, or some form of lock-in. In the end, I built my own without any of this: https://flathabits.com
I once built a rudimentary Cookie Clicker type interface sitting on top of my To Do list. The idea was that only by accomplishing my tasks could I progress through the arbitrary hamster wheel of levels that I had set up for myself. It didn’t work, and it seemed like the reason why it didn’t work was a lesson worth the ~2 hours I wasted on it: doing your tasks isn’t fun.
The problem is the method of prioritisation. I propose a method I call "task shortlisting", the only tool I've found capable of achieiving it from an interface perspective is Trello:
I personally think it's just about using the right tool for the job. Todo lists are great when you have a list of things you need to check off or remember.
I use it when shopping, or to write my todo list for the next day. And other than shopping, I just write a list on paper instead of specific apps.
Apple notes is my todo list. When a task is done I just delete the line. It's genuinely useful because it helps me remember things I would otherwise forget.
I don't use it as a "Getting Things Done" list. It's more like a "hey remember this point, if it's not important/applicable anymore just delete it".
I had to adapt and stick to my workflow though and cut the tasks into smaller digestible items or reminders. For bigger ideas I use notion for capture.
Most successful guy I know tried todo apps and didn't find them useful. Mostly used pen and paper notebooks, then partly started using Notion. It's far less rigid than todo apps and doesn't have the same huge maintenance burden. I use it too for the same purpose, and recommend it.
In addition to Reminders.app and a simple Kanban board, writing things down is my goto. Something like Reminders just lessens my mental load (calendar events also work). I don't need to remember what week is recycling or the Tues. night workout class time.
Notion IMO is overhyped. I've tried to use it and really can't stand it. I don't want to build an entire process from scratch. It feels like a tool where people can waste tons of time thinking they are doing something productive. Maybe I'm just not creative enough or I'm too old school.
The Notion setup he showed me wasn't some fancy overengineered "life dashboard", just a pretty basic Kanban board with notes, no fancy process. So it sounds about right.
ToDo apps are for people like me who are bad with remembering dates and who can’t keep up with hundreds of stuffs to deal with raising a family, new house, aging car, stuffs needed for my son and wife, groceries, taxes, mortgage, bank runs, government bureaucracy shit.
Todo apps are good for repetitive tasks. Just show one task at a time to avoid decision fatigue.
For one-off tasks, just quickly write a note, then when you have time, review notes and rank them in terms of urgency. The higher ranked notes should be seen first and more frequently.
How much do you trust an objection to self-organization posted on the personal domain name "frantic"?
As of the time of this comment, no top level or child comments have noted this post enumerates the same surface complaints always arising from the same approach to writing down massive lists of minutiae to accomplish:
The failure mode looks like this:
- pick up app
- put in lists
- get overwhelmed (or don't find it helpful)
- give up
- industriously write a post rationalizing the result
While some people succeed at TODO lists just from the basics, when most of us don't, it may be we aren't understanding the first principles in use by folks for whom the lists work.
In no particular order:
- writing an item down relieves anxiety by freeing it from your mind
- subsets and overall views enables system-level 'solves' for your workflow
- having more than one list combines these: DOING, preceded by TODO NEXT, preceded by MAYBE DO, preceded by SOMEDAY/NEVER (and follow DOING with DONE, and ARCHIVE)
- use Personal Kanban style view for overall glanceability and to limit work in progress, but don't put the SOMEDAY or ARCHIVE lists there, keep MAYBE and DONE short as well, maybe keep the MAYBE list off the view too, so you're just TODO, DOING, DONE
- skim your DOING and TODO at the start of productivity periods (mornings, afternoons, whatever), skim your MAYBE weekly or if you run out of TODO, skim your SOMEDAY/NEVER on rainy days.
- solve magnitudes by breaking down subtasks either in your own head when you do the big task, or breaking down the tasks when it's time to undertake the task. (Apps supporting an affordance such as the checklists on the back of Trello cards are a good way of hiding this detail unless you need it.)
- solve contexts (if you care about 7 in the blog post) by understanding and using ... contexts:
- contexts are particularly powerful if you context switch often. for instance, as a manager you can @context tag with your directs' initials, giving you a built-in agenda for ad-hoc 1:1s. same for @client contexts.
- contexts also go well with timeboxing, an even more powerful outcome enabler tool than lists
In short, and using numbering from the post:
1. Use the method to eliminate need for willpower
2. It's not about lists, it's about focus. Keep It Short and Simple.
3. Moving a kanban card to a DONE column provides that dopamine hit
4. See triage / parking lot, maybe, before TODO. Limit WIP, but also limit TODO to the things you see are important. Take pleasure in pushing something back off the TODO list into the MAYBE column, or from MAYBE to SOMEDAY. Focus wins.
5. This sounds like a UI problem, reject methods or apps with this problem. Both paper methods and good tools don't have this issue, offering at least 3 orders of human timescale magnitudes.
6. Use Timeboxing so the calendar provides the nudge to switch into a context until the timebox becomes a habit. (Habits beat nudges.)
7. See above on contexts.
At the root of most objections to TODO methods is this single most fundamental misunderstanding and mis-implementation:
- the main point of such lists is not to make you do things
- it's to help you NOT do things!
Use your lists to NOT do things, and the whole value prop flips, which goes to the heart of motivation as well. Think: by jotting these down, there's so many things I don't have to think about, so many things I don't have to do now. I am freed to focus on value.
It's no accident OmniFocus features the word Focus in the name. However, that app is relatively overwhelming for anyone but the most die-hard GTD fans. Tools more like Trello (or Toodledo, or Remember the Milk) can do everything necessary, but so can (perhaps surprisingly!) Apple Reminders or Microsoft TODO or OneNote or Obsidian or OrgMode, or really any text outliner with an ability to mark or flick text from one place to another.
For ideas on how to use other tools, check out David Allen's many guides to implementing GTD across all kinds of tools. Then, don't stress about GTD, just do personal Kanban with some of the GTD principles and timebox your focus.
For what it's worth, I don't think the author is against focus tools, just complaining about tools that are bad for the job!
> Willpower needed to make decisions is a limited resource.
The solution I found for that is to just let the tool I'm using make the choice for me. Then if I don't want to do what's been selected, I just ask for another proposition
"TODO" feels more like a status than a class of activity. Maybe a todo app should just filter tasks from other apps? If a todo app was automatic, I think I'd be a lot more inclined to keep using one.
It is beyond my comprehension why TODO apps exist. I mean, there's Notepad, and there are notepads, and I really don't see a workflow that is not suitable for them.
I used habitica for years, and it's better than your average todo list apps, but it's like adding a whole layer of things to take into consideration on top of the things that needs to be done
I use habitica - and it suffers in a major way from the "tasks disappearing after you complete them" thing. I think that they disappear after 30 days if you don't pay for their membership, and after 90 days if you do. There's no "keep forever" option no matter how much money you give them.
I want to be able to see the list of things I've completed so I can analyze whether I'm successfully using the app for more life changing tasks like "apply to school" or more simple ones like "get milk."
Todo lists are also highly recommended for people with ADHD for unstimulating, repetitive tasks. Chore sheets, for example, are how my house stays marginally clean. Chores are broken into daily, weekly, and monthly tasks. Again, the best reward is tick the box. The irony here is that I've lived my whole life with ADHD, and it wasn't until my kid struggled with his own ADHD that I learned this incredible hack from his counselor.
Lists are stressors. Unwritten lists are way bigger stressors. When you tick the box the relief is palpable. That said, I don't use apps for this purpose. Pen and paper, a whiteboard, or a laminated printout is best. Because the last thing I need when I'm aiming to finish unstimulating tasks is to interact with a smartphone.