This is fine for routine or urgent tasks. But what about tasks that are important and to be done later… like renewing vehicle insurance, hunting for a new apartment, researching a topic? One may not remember to do them when the right day comes, and so the need for reminders. Since most todo list applications support reminders, ditching the list may not be helpful here.
I’ve always found todo lists useful. Here’s a list to explain how todo lists are useful:
- They help me stay organized. I know what has to do be done and my goals are always written down somewhere.
- It feels good to complete something on the list and take it off the list
- Writing down lists is like programming, it’s just an algorithm
- Lists are awesome
I find a task/time manager so important that I’ve actually rolled my own. The biggest thing that I need, that I can’t find from any popular task manager is the ability to create arbitrary depth trees. Task managers offer sub-lists, but I don’t want that. I want the ability to keep dividing tasks into arbitrarily smaller sub-tasks, which is often the case when I get started on them. Also I want the ability to point my task manager to only a node and see only tasks in that sub-tree. That way I’m not worried about home maintenance tasks when I’m doing work stuff.
Without a good task manager context switching becomes very expensive. Yes, ideally one shouldn’t need to context switch hardly at all. sit down for the day and work on your project. But I work in data science research, so I frequently have jobs cooking on an HPC cluster. Without a task manager I’ll just browse over to Reddit while waiting on a job.
Finally a task manager is needed for storing ideas or things that need to be done long-term, but don’t have priority right now. I’ll write a piece of code to fit some data, and along the way have an idea about how weight the data better. But it may take a lot of effort that simply isn’t immediately justifiable. But if I come back to revisit the project I don’t want to forget this idea. This is another area that most popular task managers don’t do well at: long-lived tasks that function more as placeholders than a step on a checklist.
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Not sure if this is an April fools as the content is such rubbish. I can’t even begin to fathom how inflexible you must be to perform in the workplace with an attitude like this.
Seriously surprised by this post.
I think deciding the three most important things to do every day is a sign of flexibility – whereas becoming subservient to an insanely meticulous and detailed “list” of things you “must” do is … quite the opposite.
Productivity, by Ron Conway – David Lee
I finally settled on a system. I asked Ron [Conway] what he does. It’s pretty simple. In the morning, he sets three things to do for the day. If he does all three, then it’s a good day. If he doesn’t, then it’s a bad day.
That said, I think calendars are fine for things that are scheduled, so you can actually allocate your time realistically. I’d much rather see people maintain a practical calendar (or as @andrewducker said. grab the next item you think makes sense from the common pool) than stress themselves out over a never-ending, always-expanding list of “things that I need to get done”…
I work in a law office. (I have a coding background, but ended up in law).
I manage 30ish files that have a shelf-life of one to two years. Each file has things that need to get done, and usually those things need to be managed on a weekly or monthly basis.
I use Outlook 2007’s task feature and it makes my job much easier. There aren’t three things that need to get done every day. Each day there are 25 things, which I scheduled for myself yesterday, a week ago, a month ago, or a year ago. I simply couldn’t simulate that level of functionality and responsibility with my memory, or distill it down to a list of three things a day.
I really admire any process or method that could free ourselves from overloarded to-do lists. But ‘Three Things’ doesn’t take into account one’s capacity for work or the level of effort necessary for each Thing.
I agree flexibility is the key here. But I think I get even more flexibility using Kanban.
Totally agree.
Sure people have deadlines, like I must reply to 4 emails and return 2 calls before the end of the day. People have appointements, like I must meet this particular client at 2 PM. People have obligations, like I really do have to test this engine to ensure the plane is safe to fly. Those aren’t just TODOs and have by all means to be track somehow.
But in a creative work such as coding, or in one’s personnal life, there is a whole bunch of stuff we think we have to do in order to maybe improve something. I think the longer is the list, the less gets done.
Picking the 3 items you want to do today out of a list is easier than picking the same 3 things from memory.
A large ToDo list is not supposed to be a source of stress, nor subservience. It just means you have an organized central repository of things that you want to acomplish as a human being. It’s a fine tool to understand yourself in a fuller scope, and to relieve yourself of the burden of memory.
Perhaps the stress comes from thinking that at some point you will be done with your ToDo list. You won’t be, and you’re not supposed to, that’s not how it works. The ToDo list is a model of your activity, past and future. Finishing an item will generate more items, that’s the very nature of doing things. The only question is whether you want to keep this model up to date. What you gain in personal insight and ease of mind is worth that small overhead.
Just accept the list as an integral part of your life, and the subservience will go away. It’s just a thing you do now.
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This advice was also in the Dale Carnegie “Skills for Success” course, and it’s really good advice for dealing with a huge todo list. You should still keep that Trello list everything you need to do, but focus is super important.
My preference is to ask the question like this: “If I got in an accident tonight and am unable to work for the next couple days, what are the three things I absolutely have to finish today?” Sometimes it’s only one or two, and that’s ok too.
When I started doing the “Top 3”, I found it difficult to get even one of those things done, let alone all three - other things kept popping up. This is where the other bit of advice from that class is critical: you should review your list at the end of every day and do a retrospective on what went well, or what could be improved. If you don’t complete items on your list, why? If customer issues keep interrupting you, then maybe you need some help managing customers (hire someone or build/buy a tool to help you).
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I admit I only quickly scanned the comments and performing a quick ctrl + f before posting.
Last week I finished Gary Keller’s “The One Thing,” and his approach is even simpler: “What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
http://www.amazon.com/The-ONE-Thing-Surprisingly-Extraordinary/dp/1885167776
One thing? I got pushback with three things! 
Next you’ll be telling us zero things.
Ahem.
Zero things is the course of action taken by the majority. No thanks!
Say, that’s pretty nifty how I just mentioned a book in plain text, and Amazon warriors popped out to present me with gifts. Well done!
I’m new around these parts, in case you couldn’t tell.
I think most of the horror expressed in the comments here is just a matter of semantics. I most certainly keep a to-do list, but I don’t allow more than three things to get on to my to-do list for today. I have daily, weekly, monthly, and forever to-do lists.
And just to clarify, I completely support a research notebook (stuff that you may or may not get to, or even need to do at all) and a calendar (stuff that is scheduled in your available time). But these are very different from to-do lists.
It seems that @codinghorror would call my forever to-do list a “research notebook”, and my monthly and weekly to-do lists just seem to be versions of a “calendar”. When I create a weekly to-do list, I move as many of these things as possible onto my actual calendar. My daily to-do list generally consists of no more than three important things (in addition, perhaps, to some less important things on my calendar, like “pay the rent”, for example).
The indignation that many of feel from being told our to-do lists are wrong just comes from @codinghorror mansplaining using a very limited definition of “to-do list”. If we recognize that his definition only applies to our daily to-do lists minus any scheduled maintenance activities, I think that many more of us will find ourselves in agreement with his advice…
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This post really bugged me. I’ve got severe freakin’ AHDH, and my to-do lists (yes, plural, they’re hierarchal) aren’t a crutch, they’re the electric wheelchair that I’m hopelessly dependent on to live a meaningful life. Then again, they aren’t fancy whachamacallits that would break when slapped out of my hands, they’re two notebooks and a small whiteboard. Even if I can remember the things I need to do today (whiteboard), by tomorrow I won’t remember what is still left to do (cheap notebook), and two weeks from now I won’t even remember what projects I’m working on (fancy notebook).
My point is that people have systems, and they’re often about more than just organization. Mine is out of sheer necessity, but for others it’s to improve their productivity.
Checkout workflowy.com . It takes a bit to get used to it if you are coming from a more standard todo-list app, but it does exactly what you’ve described. Its basically an outlining utility, where each node can implictly act as a todo item, but can itself contain todo-items. It has a very minimalist feel and is a pure joy to use. It doesn’t prescribe any particular workflow and is insanely flexible. They’ve made a big effort to get keyboard shortcuts and other niceties that let you fly through it, and it works pretty well with a mouse or tablet. Being able to quickly drill down into a particular project, topic, or even a sub-task really helps keep you focused on the project at hand.
I use it for brainstorming, initial research, and have my GTD system inside of it. If I need to do something more intensely media oriented (say, researching website designs and I need to take screenshots), I will kick over to OneNote and just create a link between the two spots so I don’t have to fumble around to find things later.
Turn Your Entire Life Into A List With Workflowy – TechCrunch
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I like your gif. I’ll raise you a jpg and some youtubes 
I think most people’s experience with todo lists is like this:
Or like this
(caution, loud gun noises)
And because they got a black eye, they never learned how to wield them effectively like this:
(caution, loud gun noises)
What is a list?
I think part of the disagreement happening in the discussion here is that there is a group of people who see calendars, shared project pools, and even checklists as all under the moniker of ‘task-list’.
A calendar is just a task-list with a time constraint (and potentially other person assigned to it). A project’s task pool is just a bunch of tasks that are associated with a particular project/outcome. A checklist is just a premade task-list that makes sure you don’t forget to complete a step in a defined process (or help form a habit). A context list are tasks that can only be completed within a particular set of constraints . All of these may or may not be assigned to an individual person. To many, talking about managing a todo-list includes all the processing and actions associated with dealing with all these ‘lists’.
Saying no to ‘todo-lists’ ends up being misinterpreted as saying no to all these things. But what I think you are actually discussing is a particular case: the list of items that are assigned to you (and aren’t time-constrained in some way).
Not all lists are created equal.
I think where most people fail with todo lists (if they can work up the discipline to keep and use one) is that they take a naive approach to managing them. They just push all their tasks on the top of the stack, and spend way too long searching through it. When they do sort them, its by a reactive “whats on fire” instead of a more optimum triage based ordering.
Llike many sorting algorithms, it is often more efficient to keep a list sorted as you add items, but many people haven’t trained in that discipline muchless recognized it as a problem. If you looked at a time graph of the the average todo-list list’s items, it would look an awfully lot like a bozosort.
When people try to take on large lists, they don’t keep them sorted or stored in a priority queue. This ends up pushing the limits of their meatware. Of course lists that use an O(n^2) algorithm are going to be a drain on someone’s productivity!
One answer to this problem is to reduce the load on your system. The other is to work on a better algorithm. If you keep your list small, linear searching an unsorted list is indeed the quickest route. But you have to change up the style if you want to maintain a large list with a fast lookup and effective sorting. This aspect is overlooked by most people since the naive approach is to keep doing what worked for the small list.
Not all lists are solving the same problem.
An important factor that seems to be overlooked is that different people need different things out of their productivity system. Some people legitimately need the crutch. The imagery of ‘slapping this thing out of your hand’ feels like a slap in the face and you are getting passionate responses because of that harsh feeling.
I personally suffer from Asperger’s syndrome and long-term depression. Lists are a very useful crutch to keep me grounded. Depression is fun because it comes with bouts of short-term memory disruption and occasionally losing sight of long-term goals. Asperger’s comes with the occasional mental meltdown where I lose the ability to think beyond the next step. Especially problematic is that my brain doesn’t get the normal cortisol shot in the morning so I am basically a zombie for the first three or four hours after I wake up, and both conditions are rife with sleep disturbances like insomnia. Lists (and meditation) help mitigate these problems. Some days I litterally can not function without them.
Todo lists solve the biggest issue coming out of having Asperger’s meltdowns. When you litterally can’t think, the act of deciding becomes impossible. To stay productive, I need to keep a list of things that I should be doing. When I am tired (or stressed) my decision making faculties sometimes begin to shutdown. Where most people notice when they are getting stressed and can avoid it, I often don’t notice it until too late. By the time I recognize that i’m at my limit, the stress hormones are already shutting down my prefronal cortex. If I don’t pre-prepare this list, the overhead of ‘deciding what to do next’ sets me up for the ultimate case analysis paralysis. Since I can’t predict when I’ll get this way, I use a small amount of my ‘high-functioning’ time to help future me make those decisions.
Other times, I need my system to keep me focused - to remind me of the important things I should be doing and help guard me from distractions. Another fun part of Aspergers is that it is far too easy to get obsessed on a topic or end up wasting hours researching when I should be working on something, using a list lets me remember what I was working on as it acts a sort of ‘mental bookmark’.
Both depression and Asperger’s lead to memory problems. Not needing to trust my brain for the important things is a godsend. Before I got in the habit of making (and maintaining) lists, I was always anxious that I’d be forgetting something important. My original foray into lists started because of how often even really serious things would just up and slip my mind. The trope of the absent minded professor may be a cliché, but for me its a real problem that keeping a well maintained list helps me deal with.
For the larger picture, I use the todo-list to make sure that the overall arch of my life is in a direction that aligns with my goals and isn’t being dictated by circumstance - keeping track of what I’m doing helps to adjust the rudder. Depression has a nasty habit of making you lose sight of whats important to you, so the habit of trusting my todo-lists keeps me moving forward through the down times.
Lists aren’t always the answer.
I’m not going to draw a line in the sand and claim that there is one right way to organize what you need to do. For many, the three things method may be optimal. But for others, the benefits of keeping lists can make a huge difference in their lives. Living without a list, to me, is like living life in a fog. If you can get by without one, more power to you!
I agree, most people waste time on their productivity system. Without discipline and training and the right mindset, your todo list will own you. I can’t blaim anyone for resenting that. Its tragic to see people become a slave to their list, (or even worse, a slave to someone elses!). The difference between using a todo list effectively, and using them naively is a pretty large gap.
The difference in performance is as stark as keeping a shared task pool that people can pull from, and having management arbitrarily stack stuff on your plate. To make an analogy: it feels like you are arguing that we shouldn’t keep task pools at all because push oriented assignment sucks.
TL;DR:
Not everyone will realizes that merge sort is a practical means to to alphabetize a 300 disc physical music collection in parallel. But for those who do, dealing with large todo lists probably isn’t going to be that much of a time sink.
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Apparently you hate lists except if they’re a pool and then you’re a huge fan.
My opinion on this topic is find what works for you and your team. Obviously lists work for a ton of people as is very apparent by only reading the comments on this page. Given your own replies it also seems like you are only sometimes against lists. Mainly when they’re for personal things that you have to do in that day. If this is indeed the case then I think you should clarify in your article because the way it is written it seems like you just hate lists in general which is silly.
So, I guess the point is "get just a few important things done every day and seize the day"
But… Why not two things? Why three? This is a very specific question, as if I were to be as smart as you and write such an awesome post, I’d choose 2 only because of an old saying in portuguese that goes something like “1 is too little, 2 is good, 3 is too much”.
