I have a terrible memory. I’ve lived with lists my whole life. I couldn’t get through the day without them.
I do need todo lists for what some people above mentioned: groceries, paying bills, filling out a form, generating a data export for someone, … Things I can safely say I’ll do, but that I put off to the last minute anyway so might as well put them on a todo list with a date attached and forget about it.
Things that definitely don’t work is stuff like implementing features or getting documents written up or the like. Some days I’m really productive (or rather, motivated), some days I’m not. So todo lists usually only make me feel guilty, or trivialize the amount of work I just did with a single checkbox. I think it’s solid advice to forget about tracking that sort of thing (or rather, not with a todo list).
I think the main problem is that people thinks that todo lists are really just plain lists , this is why Jeff and most of others hates TODO lists. After years of searching and trying +100 tools, I finally found that all TODO lists apps really suck, whatever how they have beautiful and creative user interface. Actually you need something like a virtual secretary or a life organizer that turn your TODO list stupid items into a super items that you can track. I really love this one http://s.dxnimg.com/screenshots/1/SwiftToDoList7-Main-2_original.png?1329435834
http://www.dextronet.com/swift-to-do-list-lite
It really changed how I think about TODO lists, I encourage everyone to use it , I use the free lite version.
I think lists are important. The thing is to know how to use them, expire ones which are just undoable and not add items which are huge, or vague. “Sort out job” or “Stop biting nails” is something you know you need to do and doesn’t really need a list. But “buy wife flowers” just jogs the memory.
Didn’t Hoffstadter already cover this in Godel, Escher, Bach? That is to say, Reductionism versus Holism? Then again, maybe it’s because I spent more than a bit of time earning my undergrad CS poking around in scheme, but I find nothing wrong with lists. Provided, that is, I treat them as immutable and toss them in the garbage when I’m done with them.
My point is, I use lists. It’s very difficult for me to not. However, I used what I learned in computing theory to find a solution (of sorts) of the problem of pointless reductionism and wasting too much time trying to put everything that absolutely must be done on the list. Basically, I keep my lists short (no more than five items), and immutable (no adding items once the list is completed). To accomplish this, I set a time limit for creating the list of no more than five minutes at the end of my workday. Finally (the important part), I do all of this on paper and intentionally dispose of the list after 24 hours.
My point is I intentionally treat the lists I do use as a collection of symbols to be manipulated, nothing more. This (for me, at least), effectively halts the endless reductionism and allows me to work on a more holistic level at whatever problem I am solving without being quite so absent-minded that important things that need to be done do not get done.
My method may, or may not, work for you.
In addition to the (very, VERY real) forgetfulness issue, which a lot of people here have already covered, I personally find to-do lists a useful analytical tool. If something’s been on my list for multiple days without getting done, why is that? Is the task not actually worth doing? Is there’s something else that has to be done first in order to proceed? Do I have some sort of mental block against finishing it? Thinking about these things helps me cut the cruft and get the important stuff done.
I can’t imagine doing this as a purely mental activity, particularly in a cubicle.* Even if I were working in a monastery, using lists is faster and more accurate. The tool itself isn’t evil; it’s just people’s relationship to it that’s messed up.
* Yeah, yeah, cubes are evil. But you can’t expect people working in them to abandon all attempts to stay productive.
Jeff, I urge you to read “The Checklist Manifesto” (http://www.amazon.com/The-Checklist-Manifesto-Things-Right/dp/0312430000/) and see if that changes your stance. It’s arguably the most important book I’ve read on the subject.
Well Jeff the thing is, we have to-do lists because we actually don’t wanna do the stuff in the list.
Let’s say I follow your advice and stop taking notes about whatever my boss tells me to do or the stuff I have to get done for myself by the weekend.
If I do that I’ll probably lose my work and play video games all weekend long. The advice “if it’s important you will remember to do it” is untrue. I have important stuff THAT I HATE doing but I have to do. Also there is always those things that you only remember that need doing when you actually need them - like calling your girlfriend, hehe. Okay, bad joke.
But yeah, if I throw away my To-do list and only do what I remember because that is what really matters I would probably play games the whole day and do nothing.
What’s with the self-help column all of a sudden?
Also, what’s with the inability of most people to understand that not everybody else is exactly like them?
Todo lists don’t work for Jeff, okay. But they do work for a lot of people (myself included), so what is the purpose of this post? To discourage all of those people in the middle who can’t seem to get themselves organized?
I wish that more people I know – particularly my colleagues – were better at managing their tasks. Most of the people that I work with don’t have the luxury of waking up in the morning and working on whatever 3 things pop into their mind. They have many complex commitments due on different days.
Hi Jeff, thanks for the link-love. Appreciated.
My current insight (helped in part by ‘Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities’ http://www.43folders.com/2009/04/28/priorities ) is that the list of tasks you make is not really a TODO list at all.
The list you make are the list of things that are so unimportant that you don’t need to do them immediately.
By putting them on a list you should relieve yourself of all guilt in relation to them. You are saying “These things are low enough priority that they can sit here undone for at least one more day.”
So I’m pouring all my not-to-do items into Trello. And working on just one item at a time, taken from that list. And even that one item is not a real priority.
Real priority is saved for real things – like two weeks ago when my daughter broke her arm, badly.
That was a priority. I rushed to be with her and didn’t even need to consult my todo list for a moment.
cheers
lb
Have you ever found a todo list (paper or electronic) weeks, months or even years after you lost track of it? Do you recall how stressed out you were when creating that list and how half the things on it seemed to be matters of life and death? And now here it is, that list, many if not most of the items on it undone and here you are, alive and unscathed.
Maybe that’s what we should do. Make lists and then put them aside to be read at a later date as insights into what really matters to us.
As a programmer I recently realised that my todo list was basically a mix of a feature list and a bug list. So now my todo list has one two items on it. Work through bug list and work through feature list.
I use Google Calendar as my “todo” list. I put almost everything I have to do in a day (including things like grocery shopping) on my calendar. The time spent is only a few minutes a week, since most events are recurring. The main reason I do this isn’t because I’d forget to do these things otherwise, but it’s to stop me from over-committing. I have a tendency to say “yes” whenever someone asks me to do something, and then regretting it later. When I keep my calendar full, I can pull out my smart phone, look at all the things I intended to do on that day, and say “Sorry, I just don’t see room for that on my schedule”. It works pretty well for me. And it has the advantage that missed tasks don’t pile up. Unless I deliberate reschedule a past event for the future it just falls into the void of the past on my calendar.
As someone who spent their entire life up to age 30 without any kind of formal system, and never having read lifehacker or 43folders or any productivity porn, I have much more experience with what Jeff is advocating than he does, and he’s right, it works. You can absolutely keep everything in your brain and pick the most important things to work on and be very successful that way; I certainly was. However there are downsides.
Sometimes you forget things that actually really were important. When this happens you may feel guilt that’s a lot more real and justifiable than the self-imposed guilt of an unfinished todo list. As the complexity of your life ramps up, especially with modern life and knowledge-work being what it is, you can develop anxiety over not forgetting things. The human brain isn’t evolved to manage the lifestyle complexity that many of us live on a daily basis.
So a couple years ago when the complexity of my life had grown to the point where I was feeling pretty severe negative consequences from the demands on my time, I decided I needed something better than my ad-hoc ways. I read Getting Things Done, and I was surprised to find out that the gist of it is not a rigid process-oriented system, but rather the idea that if you can get things out of your brain into a system that you can trust, it frees your mind to enjoy life better. Sure there’s overhead of maintaining some lists and you have to tune it to your specific workload, but with modern digital tools I’ve got my personal system humming along where I don’t think about it more than 5 mins a day, spend 20 mins a week on review, and the list doesn’t grow out of control because I gasp delete things from it rather than ascribe some false weight to it simply because it’s written in text rather than bouncing around in my brain.
If Jeff’s new-found-meat-minimalism makes him more productive than more power to him, but this whole article reads like one big overreaction to having been mired in productivity porn for too long. TMTOWTDI.
Here’s my thought on lists and my need an why they fall off my “radar” as it were. I do not have control over my time at work. I don’t have control over what is needed to be done. I need to use a list to try and remember who asked for what, and by answering a question has made me responsible for it. Using a to-do list helps me remember what I’m responsible. I don’t let it run my life, just is the thing that reminds me what is promised.
As far as home goes, it’s the little hooks that remind me that I should dust the countertop, or run the shower curtan through the wash. It’s not what I need to do, it’s what I need to see. It’s a difference in how I use omnifocus.
I like to think of my lists as secondary storage. Off-loading future stuff to a piece of paper frees up my local “cache” to focus on more important things. FWIW, I don’t use TO-DO apps or lists to prioritize, only to keep track of stuff that’s important enough to not lose in case it’s “swapped out” of my memory by something more important.
I don’t think the problem is with lists per-se. I go through phases of using a to-do list when I realise that I’m not coping with storing the necessary data in my head. And at this point it becomes invaluable. But generally I then slip back below a threshold where I realise that my head will work as efficiently as I need it to. I, like many others, read GTD back in the day, and I think the key lesson he does give - above and beyond any methods and techniques - is that trying to keep track of information in your head can be much more stressful than being able to put it on a list and then “forget” it can be.
I think the real mistakes are:
- that once you've started writing a list it needs to turn into a system which rules your life.
- that there's some silver bullet app either in existence, or waiting to be invented, which is better than pen and paper.
Wow, Jeff, I normally take your recommendations as gospel but this is the worst advice I’ve ever seen. If your lists stress you out, You’re Doing It Wrong.
Unless you don’t have that much going on, you have more to do than your brain can effectively keep track of. Getting that stuff out of your head and into some sort of trusted system is the best thing you can do for your own mental health. To-do lists aren’t for productivity, they’re for peace of mind. They’re so your brain feels reassured that it doesn’t have to keep reminding you at awkward times (e.g. 2 AM) about some unmet commitment you’ve made.
I think most task-tracking systems out there suffer from an excess of complexity. A text file works fine. Google Tasks, which is just one step up from that (it adds integration with Gmail and easy nesting of tasks) is what I use. And rather than try to assign due dates to tasks, I just group them under headings like this:
- CRITICAL TODAY
- TARGET TODAY
- TARGET THIS WEEK
- OTHER STUFF
The key here is to keep the “critical today” list to what you ABSOLUTELY have to do today, i.e. stuff you’d stay at work late or stay up late to finish.
The other key is a GTD-style weekly review, where you go over the entire list and make sure that everything on the list still belongs there.
@Nir Alfasi
If you call being pulled over by a cop “routine”, you have more important things to worry about than a to do list.
They have a book about this called ‘18 minutes’. It basically addresses what you are talking about. The truth is you will not get it all done. It isn’t going to happen because todo lists don’t really factor time and preparedness, nor do they factor your priorities. No one leaves work early because they just don’t have anything to do.
I use a combo of the todo list, and mostly the calendar. I did stop relying so heavily on the todo list because I found it insufficient for a life that involves other people. The other thing is that time spent not doing something can be just as productive. It gives you a chance to step and see if the process of getting things are done can be improved instead of the knee-jerk reaction that happens to the events as they occur.