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.
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."
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’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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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 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.
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...
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.)
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).
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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."
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."
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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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
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 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.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadI 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."
I'd love to see that list
It's really quite effective, and I find that much of the problem (aside from cost!) is uncomfortably stripped down to just UX.
Which is fun, but not what I signed up for when I got obsessed about this whole thing...
The new one will be "have your AI call my AI and ..."
[0] https://essaywriteronline.co/what-does-have-your-people-call...
Kind of clunky but if a proper chat + todo + llm hybrid was made, then that would be something worth exploring.
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.
What is the author using instead of todo app? Paper? Or are they just living in chaos.
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.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SW7CsUrIy4
I think the measurement focus is useful as you will naturally react to the measurement and that will affect your behaviour.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s available at https://tatask.com
I’m always open to feedback on improving it too.
https://github.com/lelanthran/frame/blob/release/v0.1.4/docs...
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).
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.
And compared to say Jira the benefit here is unlimited sub folders?
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!
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!
Damn.
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.)
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.
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).
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!
One of these things is not like the other.
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 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.
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.
Wouldn’t an array be more appropriate if you are memory limited?
Also, task apps, similar to note taking apps, tend to charge way too much for what they are.
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.
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 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.
From Todoist:
> Become focused, organized, and calm with Todoist. The world’s #1 task manager and to-do list app.
> Reach that mental clarity you’ve been longing for.
From Things:
> Things is the award-winning personal task manager that helps you plan your day, manage your projects, and make real progress toward your goals.
> Get Things, Get Done. Whatever it is you want to accomplish in life, Things can help you get there
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?
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/markmurphy/2018/04/15/neuroscie...
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.
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.
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.
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".
Move "ideas" into "todos" with intent.
And by the way this:
> 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.
For example, "Implement a TSP solver in JS" is a task. "Learn JS" is a goal.
I'm very ok with the backlog being where good ideas go to die, and I'm very ok with sub-tasks (indented list).
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 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.
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.
I disabled all useless notification and now on my lock screen I only see things I need to process.
I get message from someone that I don't want to reply right away? I just leave that notification on screen.
All reminders, mails and various other notifications (my washing machine pings me when its done) stay on my screen until I do what needs to be done.
This together with using trello as personal scrum board really helped me todo more.
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.
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.
I actually use Microsoft TODO now, for all the various features. But important things I do back up onto the calendar too.
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 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).
The only person I currently found discussing another way of looking at willpower that completely resonated with my experience was Scott Young (https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2018/02/09/rethinking-disci...).
Excerpt:
"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."
https://madprops.github.io/Hoff/
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 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.
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.
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
- 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.
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.
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
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.
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.