My wife and I use a task “dumping ground” of a sorts with trello and use it to communicate fine details of the task. This has helped us in moving into our new house which had many sub tasks and fine grained detail to recall later. Otherwise we go off of memory and usually accomplish 3 things in a day on average.
However, we don’t arrange it of what we are going get done for the day, we just talk in the morning what would need to get done and jot the notes done in the application for later reference.
Currently, Google Keep
Wow, I guess we don’t use TODOs list for the same things at all.
My TODOs list is a bunch of checkbox written hastily in OneNote. The tops levels items are a reflection of my assigned tasks on our Kanban board. The lower levels are the sub-tasks I need to do to complete that task. Now, that list get populated slowly as I code, as I find area that need work but I don’t want to do right now. This is pressure relieve : by putting on the TODOs list, I can think “oh I’ll do it later” instead of wanting to do it now. Else I’ll go crazy with the refactoring and forget the thing that is most pressing (ie, fixing that bug, or completing the story). And more often that not, I simply delete half of them because the code changed so much that its no longer an issue. Also, some of them get promoted to bugs/engineering task on the Kanban Board.
But then again, this is reversing the concept of TODOs list. I use them to not do something immediately. Those items can stay 1 week on my TODOs list and I don’t care. Heck, I am happy when I can delete them without having done them!
TODOs list should be used to prioritize work,. You write all you need/want to do, sort them by importance, and focus on the more important items, knowing well that you won’t do the less important one. Kind of like Scrum backlog, really.
Nothing has freed my mind up more than having a place to dump stuff I need to remember. It gives me a tremendous feeling of peace, that I know that list (which is a trello-board btw) is a safe place to put things, so I can stop worrying about whether I will remember them or not - I don’t have to!
The ability to prioritize tasks is very different to that of remembering stuff. Don’t confuse them. 
I agree with earlier posts that distinguish a memory cache from a list of important thingsI have a lihit labs memopad from jetpens.com. What happens if you’ve completed or can’t move the three things? I just look and see what I can accomplish. It also has the hall dozen non urgent things I need to eventually, things I need to do on certain dates, and info to do them.
Maybe you are mr eidetic memory with internal multiple alarm clock.
But people who have broken legs may find crutches useful.
I think that to-do lists work very well if someone else is adding tasks for you, i.e. something like Jira used to cooperate with PMs.
I’m adding this to my to-do list.
I use what works.
I don’t view TODO lists or sticky notes as a crutch or a productivity killer, I view them as a way to quickly write down tasks, etc. so I don’t have to hold that info in my head all the time.
I always ask myself “What’s the most important thing to do right now?” - both in my day job and on our farm. There’s always a “most important” thing to do. Sometimes the “most important” thing is the lowest hanging fruit task, not the hardest to solve. It’ll depend.
The calendar is for “must do on/by this date” items.
Life’s busy - I’ve got 4 projects, a greenhouse and farm planting schedule to manage, myriad farm tasks, kids, a user group and did I mention kids? Having a list so things don’t fall through the cracks works.
Using what works is the key. Everything else is just some cock-and-bull “you should do it like me” story.
Just my opinion.
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tl;dr Don’t organise the things you have to do into a list. Just remember 3 things in your head instead…
Hmm… I’m not buying it. I have 4 things to do. Where did this 3 come from? Probably the same place that your Rule of 3 came from, you like that number. I love your writing but sometimes it can feel like an over-editorialised self help blog. Looking forward to more techy development content! 
Oh, didn’t hear about Trello before, thank you very much, will be great for my wife and I. Not so much to motivate myself to do stuff, more to actually remember what I’m supposed to do.
Yes, I know, not the point of the blog post, but still.
I remeber a discussion on the Stackoverflow podcast where someone advocated to make decisions based on experience instead of religion. You slapped him in the face by stating that we should all work with smart people which would bring us all to fairy land and live happily ever after. Which was totally religious of you. I personally have an experience working with someone much smarter than me, learning nothing because he solved all the hard problems without bothering to explain.
Now you are again proposing some sort of law that somehow applies to everyone in all of time. I find my todo lists very usefull, don’t use any special programs, just Notepad writing down a list.
- My list of stuff I want to do at some point ever. Notice the ‘want’. And I don’t even think about having 25 items on it.
- Items that must atleast be done to complete a user story.
Just because you think a todo list should be exaustive and as short as possible, does not mean we all make that mistake.
Please stop turning personal lessons learned into law for all to follow.
3 things is a great place to start. I find myself changing my organization skills just to mix it up and re-energize my wanting to follow it. But I need a list. Can not live without a list. The practice of keeping things from hitting your list is the best practice (doing it now), but in real life, there will always be …things. I like to group my list. daily, weekly, monthly. As I lose focus on my daily to-do’s, I just look at my list to find something that I can stay focused on, more fun, or has a chance to finish fast and get back to the grind. On my list I also have chores that need to be done around the house. Sometimes while working from home, I get stuck, and to get my focus back, I just find something else to do. I am a want-to-be programmer, and can not wait to create programs to hold my list. drop and drag features to help me prioritize list. Sure, I could buy the program, but this is on my bucket list, so might as do it myself. You know, just add it my huge list of things I want done.
I have about 25 items on my to-do list. All serious tasks, that need to be completed, for
customers/co-workers, over the next couple of weeks.
What on earth makes anyone think that I could just “Do one thing”? Unless that one thing is “Check my to-do list, and get the next item on it done.”
Seriously, are there people out there that don’t have a lot of items that need to be completed, in order to do their job?
I find that bigger my task list gets the more likely I am not going to complete it. If I was you with a huge list like that, I would just aim to get one thing done. Break that one thing into the tiniest managable step. As soon you do, you just start to get momentum. Look up Tiny Habits by Bj Fogg which is a clever psychological hack that I used to get more productive habits like running, flossing my teeth, calling my clients etc. . .
I do have a task list on my whiteboard which stares at me everyday until I complete a task. Every sunday, I wipe off what got done and than put another on.
Hope the Tiny Habits approach works for you.
I have to disagree. The problem is the application of such a broad generalization. My TODO list consists of bugs currently assigned to me in TFS, ordered by priority. Given this, this post seems to advocate not using deficit/bug tracking systems. After all, isn’t this what a bug tracking system is but a To-Do list? I know this seems absurd but isn’t that what is being said here?
I don’t have a problem getting my task list completed. I simply work through it in priority order, ticking things off as I get them done.
But I do have, as I say, 25 items that need to be done, or the right code isn’t being deployed to the right people at the right time, the right documentation isn’t being written, etc.
I mean, if you have 20 small bits of new functionality that are needed, each one of which is going to take three hours to write and test, then that’s less than two weeks work, and it’s a 20-item to-do list. I can’t not do some of them (customers have asked for them), and the prioritisation is set at the start of the two week iteration.
I don’t see a problem with any of this - what I see is a problem with saying “Don’t write any of these things down, just decide each morning what thing feels most important to you.” - because that way I’m going to forget at least five of those items.
Ya I agree. I have to write things down or else they will not get done. Everything I need to do is on a task list but I worry about losing them sometimes.
I dunno about this. I have the kind of brain (some would say ADHD…) where if someone tells me something, and I don’t write it down, it is quite often like they never told me in the first place.
So I need my “todo” lists so that I won’t forget about all the little things I need to get done until its too late. Paper (namely my DayTimer planner) is my long-term memory. What stays in my head is references (Hey, there was something else I had to do, wasn’t there? I wrote it down. Let’s follow the pointer…)
Jeff’s list for a typical day:
#1 - be provocative
#2 - do something
#3 - do something else
That is the secret of a successful blogger, after all.
I agree that you should start with a short list of things to do for the day, but for me, it’s usually a selection from the longer list of things that I want or need to get done. I know I won’t do them all on any given day, so trying to address more than a few is a formula for stress. The challenge is picking the right 2 or 3 (or 4 or 5) for your day.
Those are some prettty prettty prettyyyyy pretty good sentiments there