How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain | Hacker News Reader

How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain

fastcompany.com

165 pointsprostoalex58 comments

Over the years, I've tried many digital to-do lists, including one I wrote myself. Today, I just use a notebook.

The trick that I made work is to have two to-do lists: daily and quarterly.

For daily, it's simple. I have a variation of the Bullet Journal [1], but interleaved with meeting notes, ideas, etc.

But many ideas are bigger than what you can accomplish/benchmark on a daily basis. For those, I have two pages per quarter that I fill with "quarterly goals". I try to keep the list under 20-30 items and keep them high-level. Every week, I look at the same two pages and make sure that I am making progress toward them. If not, I go back to my daily notes and see if I worked on the right stuff the previous week. This is a variation on the idea that I stole from Aaron Levie [2].

For me, the tactile/tangible nature of paper note-taking, as well as its flexibility in formatting, has been incredibly useful.

[1] http://bulletjournal.com/

[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/3021586/most-productive-people-b...

The Bullet Journal looks interesting, but to me it feels much more like it should be a tablet app, than in a physical notebook (mainly due to migration of items, but this is of course achievable with an erasable pen or pencil).

I say this as someone that is trying to use a physical notebook more & better, and looking for good organisational/notekeeping schemes.

An app never works for productivity stuff.

It would be interesting to hear your experiences on this, such as what apps you've tried and had fail for you in terms of productivity?

I would agree with what you've said to a point, but this kind of statement needs expanding.

For my wife and I, we're using Wunderlist (bought my Microsoft in 2015) and we can assign things to each other, star them as important, comment on tasks, leaves notes, set reminders, and so on. It's a... wunderful (har! har!) app and so far it's UI doesn't get in the way. I'm just waiting for the moment we hit the limitations of the free version and have to spend nearly AUD$130/user/year (USD -> AUD) to maintain its place in our household.

I've tried OneNote, WorkFlowy and a few no name Android apps.

Platform issues and friction is far too high. Even just loading up the browser, or context switching to a different tab. Plus... if your work is of mathematical nature, it's an added headache.

I use the simple notes app on my Huawei phone. It's just notepad.exe basically but helps me a lot

My issue is latency from _idea in head_ to adequately captured somewhere.

A book is usually open in front of me with a pen at the ready. An application.. well it depends, but best-case scenario is that it's in a easy-to-switch-to window and is natural to just get the idea down without jumping through hoops.

As an aside from a sufferer of ADHD, I think Augmented Reality tech would be a killer platform for an in-place TODO/Note/Reminder/assistant.

A small boost to that workflow is the ability to unlock and launch apps in one swipe but that still leaves the power button, optional pin, and never being quite sure what state the app will resume in. Edit: Forgot to include the animations that run slower than my hand can move.

I prefer taking notes on paper in a spiral notebook. When it fills up, I run it through the scanner.

also pen-and-paper note taker here.

there's something satisfying about physically crossing off a list when a pen after spending 10+hrs typing

Very true, but in the real world where what's urgent goes before what's important, you are often forced to reschedule stuff, and the pen&paper approach clearly is in disadvantage here.

My solution is a dynamic todo called myTinyTodo [1], a very simple app where I can sort stuff by project, deadline, importance, etc.

[1] http://www.mytinytodo.net/

I reschedule stuff all the time, it's not a huge deal, you just copy a few items from one list into another, it takes a few seconds usually. And actually, I find I like it this way because if I hit a point where I realize I'm rescheduling too much stuff too often it tells me that I need to either follow through more often or not be so optimistic in scheduling things so much.

Committing to do a thing in a given time period should be kind of a big deal. If you don't need to commit to a thing in a specific time, then just leave it in a more general master list (e.g. monthly, or generic) and commit to it when you have the time.

I also use paper: 1) master todo list: "list of lists" what neets to be done for each category / project 2) calendar with daily todo list: what from master todo list needs to be done today or at specific day

Everything without built-in three letter agency spying... I use Moleskine.

Moleskine squared notepads are my favourite writing materials in the world. It would be nice if they weren't so expensive, but it's worth the cost.

I've tried a zillion to do apps, most of them are just not very good and add a lot of annoying overhead or have super specialized workflows that have tons of shortcomings. I started using a bullet journal in June and it's been a fantastic experience. This is what sold me on the idea: https://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelwmiller/how-to-start-a-bullet...

It's amazing how well organized you can be when you keep track of stuff better.

Another thing I've done is started keeping a sort of checklist/timeline for morning, mid-day, and end of day to make developing habits easier as well as just keeping up on to-do stuff. One of the most useful things has been to add some elements from things like this, which is a significant quality of life boost: http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2016/02/evening-ritual

Also, journals are great for facilitating things like CBT for anxiety, depression, ADHD, etc.

Do you carry your notebook with yourself everywhere?

Actually for my personal todos I just use a page of paper. I don't carry it around but sometimes I copy some tasks on a paper snippet and put it into my pocket. The very nice thing about the paper list is that it has a limit. So I don't end up having more todos than I can handle.

However for work I like Asana. Paper would be too impractical...

When I worked at MetaDesign back in the late nineties and early zeros we had something called RedBooks.

RedBooks were most of the work we had done for a specific client printed out in tabloid size bound into a spiral back book and put on a large shelf system.

We also had a matriculate digital folder system with projects, searchable and the same pages as PDF plus much more accessible from your computer.

Guess which one we used the most?

With the RedBooks it was very easy to pull out the book and look through it for inspiration, talk about how we did this or that and so on and with the book we only put in the things that where somehow relevant.

The computer folders on the other hand had everything because, yeah well why not. But what they had in quantity it lacked in human relatable tangibility.

Computers are great when the amount of information become so waste that it's impossible to manually search through it all or if you need to share a lot of your things with other people.

It turns out that for all the great things computers can help us do it still haven't solved tangibility.

No application I've ever tried has worked for me in the sense that I felt it an indispensable part of my life. In almost all instances, after a few days, I always kept forgetting to use the application. Plus, the overhead of using applications seemed to appear significant overtime.

I am now successfully down to a good fountain pen and a clear notebook. It is also part of my strategy to break my device-addiction, which is bordering on insanity. Where I used to take in my laptop to meetings and use mind maps and others for taking down notes and ideas discussed, I only simply carry my notebook -- my pen is usually in my shirt's front pocket.

I have rediscovered the love for handwriting, which I had all through my childhood and teenage years. I had a beautiful cursive handwriting and could write fast, which I gave up when I joined university in favour of a more mechanical style, and soon thereafter, gave up on writing completely. I have started writing in cursive again, and it makes for my ability to take down notes very fast in a handwriting that looks good.

The only real grievance I have is when I want my notes to be available to others. In those cases, I do wonder if it wouldn't have been better to have typed them down in the first place (I'm a fast typist). But, it is a small price I'm happily willing to pay.

I had a similar problem to yours where I would eventually forget to use the application, or just not remember to check it after finishing my current task. That lead to some fun times. My solution; at least for my work todo list, was to create a Python script and use it with the $PERIODIC callback feature of ZSH to show me my task list every 15 minutes in my shell. Since I'm working in a terminal all day long anyway, this in my face approach helped me create a habit of using my todo list (TaskWarrior) for managing my work tasks.

Though I'm still in search of something that helps in the same way for my personal life; phone and personal computer.

P.S: For the interested in how I implement the periodic call back with TaskWarrior, you can find the relevant files on my Github dotfile (https://github.com/theonejb/dotfiles/tree/master/taskwarrior)

> In almost all instances, after a few days, I always kept forgetting to use the application.

That's why the success is in building habits. It doesn't matter what medium/tool, but the initial habit building process must take place.

Wouldn't it be possible that the tool might also influence the difficulty in building said habit? If different tools require you to exert varying levels of mental effort only to remember to use them, then then medium/tool might matter.

Over the years, I've switched between several daily TODO lists. I used a plain sticky note in the beginning where I outlined all the tasks I had to do. After that I used Steven Covey's time management matrix, but I found that I'm not using all of its quadrants and some important and urgent tasks were never done on time. Currently I have a TODO list with two columns -- Making, for the long-term things I have to provide substantial amount of undivided attention to; and POSS (projects, organization, skills, social) -- for tasks which require frequent context-switching. It was greatly inspired by Paul Graham's "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" article [1].

For long-term plans, I keep a simple text file categorized by projects where I plan ahead for about one or two weeks and put deadlines for my plans. I derive these plans from my long-term goals, for which I store the big picture in various mediums (Trello, E-mails, text files, written conversations, paper, etc.)

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

I've found out recently that rather than being something you make or plan, TODO list is the end result of doing something else. Specifically, it's the result of taking notes about your life and your works, TODO list is just what left after you filter out all the actionable items.

For example, when I'm doing development work, I'm trying to keep a journal of what I'm doing, why I'm doing something, which step of the task I'm on, what the boss wanted to get done. With those info, when I get back to work tomorrow, it's simple to get back the "TODO item" in the task.

The difference being that a list of TODO things on its own is pretty hard to follow through and act: it's missing context (or the action is too vague), we tend to have certain routine anyway and an ordered list of everything isn't helpful since there is a limited number of tasks we can do at a certain context. There are some productivity that tries to fix the missing context problem by assigning context with a task, but they just amplify another issue when making todo list: it's not that simple to write an actionable item. At least 90% of the time I've tried, my item always ends up being broken down to several more items when I started working on them, or I'm missing the mark on planning the item. And they're always because I'm not in the mindset of a task when I'm making its TODO items -- I plan things at the start or end of week/ day, rather than when I'm actually doing the task.

I think TODO list is just a special kind of notes, and I think a lot of people would benefit from taking more notes about their lives, both for the past (journal) and future (planning). Although "past" and "future" is a bit of an unnecessary distinction here.

Don't make to-do list, just take more notes, write things down. You will notice all the bullet point in the article would apply if you change "writing to-do lists" into "taking notes".

Just a tangent, but that's also why I think org-mode is the only note-taking/to-do app that did it right: TODO item is both part of the normal notes, and well supported with multitude of features around it (all the agenda functionalities).

"I think TODO list is just a special kind of notes, and I think a lot of people would benefit from taking more notes about their lives, both for the past (journal) and future (planning)."

I think this is a really good point, in fact if I look at my TODO lists many if not most of the items get added after I complete them.

And you should purge it occasionally.

With Trello, I use the "card aging" feature to see which things haven't been updated or moved recently. Each week, I spend five minutes skimming through the cards, making sure there are due dates if applicable.

At the end of each month, I spend closer to 20 minutes and look at each card and ask "is this still relevant?" and give it a simple yes/no. If it's "no" I delete it immediately.

Those never-ending tasks and wish lists simply go away. It's not like I was going to do them anyway and it's less junk on the list.

I do the same for meetings. None of my recurring meetings/tasks extend past December 31st. After the January 1st, I double check to see which ones I really need and are still relevant and recreate those. The others are already done.

I wonder if some manual bookkeeping is necessary to develop a habit and give room for introspection/reflection?

Currently, I use Wunderlist and I have weekly lists. At the end of the week there is the manual process: create list for the next week and move everything left from this week over. Then I quickly look through the done items of the week.

I also have lists for long term and recurring items, but the process does not really work well. I forget them, they get outdated, etc.

This first few sentences of this article describe almost exactly how I've been feeling lately:

  For a long time, I resisted to-do lists. I wanted the flexibility. I felt that if I kept a list, it would tie me down to a particular set of tasks. Gradually, though, I came around. The busier my work life became, the more crucial it was to have some sort of running agenda on hand.

It was embarrassing after a few times when I kept forgetting important tasks, and that pushed me towards using a todo list manager at work.

Being a developer who works almost exclusively in a terminal, I settled for using TaskWarrior (TW). I can't recommend it enough for people who spend most of their time in a CLI. I tried a bunch of different options before I found TW, and my biggest problem with anything else was the added friction and mental context switch involved in switching to another app to add a task.

Now I'm looking for something more, a task manager that works everywhere. Especially for longer projects and goals, something I can use for my personal life. While TW is great for the CLI, it lacks apps for the desktop and mobile (OS X and iOS). I've settled to using Wunderlist for now, which is the best option I could find for myself, but I'd love something that works as well as TW for the desktop and mobile, which for me is just entering tasks as a single line of text and having meta data like due date, project, categorization, etc picked out automatically (which Wunderlist does for dates but not categorization).

And one very important thing I've felt a couple of days ago when I moved to Wunderlist for my personal stuff is that at least for me it makes me feel more relaxed as well. I had a bad day a while back where I was in a panic because I had a lot of things to do personally and I didn't seem to be getting anywhere with any of those tasks. I sat down for about 30 minutes and just created tasks for everything. Since then I feel a lot easier. While I may not have made any progress on the tasks, just knowing they are written down somehow makes me feel better.

When I last used Wunderlist, I really disliked how inflexible it was, and how bad it was at handling recurring tasks.

I discovered Todoist shortly after, and stuck with it.

I think for me, personally, to get anything even more productive, I'd have to write it myself.

Writing something myself is an idea I have brewing in the back of my mind. But it's not something I have any clear ideas about. I have no idea how it should work, only a vague idea that it should be as seamless to my daily routine as TaskWarrior is right now.

But I'm trying to collect notes on how I use Wunderlist and TaskWarrior. Maybe in a few months I'll have a better idea of my usage patterns and then I can come up with something that I'd love to use everywhere.

Do you have any ideas on what you'd like to write yourself? I could get ideas off of you. :)

Unlimited priority levels (as opposed to just 4), more cohesive project parenting (I can parent projects, but Todoist sometimes won't list items from child projects if I ask for the parent in some areas but not others), and probably exchange Todoist's query language for straight up SQL ala JPQL-esque usage.

Other than that, Todoist gets very little wrong (and they're constantly polishing the more mundate UX parts, which is also an important part of any frequently used app).

Their team has been often very responsive to my requests, and have also been working on integrations into other services (which is often a sore spot for 'cloud' services).

You might want to try Taskpaper. It's a just a text file so you can edit it however you like. There's an OS X app that's excellent, but the iOS app has been removed. However, a number of the better text editors on iOS support it.

+1 for Todoist, really under-rated app, and it works everywhere, including the Web.

Hm, I use Wunderlist and I am frustrated with recurring tasks. Will try Todoist.

Interesting that no one has mentioned Google Keep - it works for me, mostly because it's available for both Android and IOS and as a web service. I have to admit syncing is not always perfect, though. Just curious, any particular reason why others don't mention it?

I use Keep, and it's become a pretty central part of my life over the last year or so. I never stuck with any other to-do apps- either they were way too extensive (Evernote) or not flexible enough (Wanderlist, Google tasks, Any.do, etc). I like Keep because it lets me store random notes that I need access to during the year (books I want to read, workout lists), to do lists that are transient (a shopping list, recipes), and to do lists that need to stick around for a while (Personal Goals for September). Something about having all that just displayed on one scrollable screen works really well with my mindset where other apps feel tedious and unhelpful.

Every day before leaving work I make a todo list of what I am going to work on the next day, crossing the list as I get them done in the next day.

10 mins before leaving work I do the same.

Works really well, gives a good sense of progress, offloads thinking about work when I am home and etc.

I noticed a certain point, experimenting with todo lists and productivity apps, became a thing of its own. Tweaking Omnifocus to perfection, for example.

I threw them all out and am using a reporters notebook (which is a good format, btw), with daily todos and this is the system that sticks.

I guess this is what it really boils down to: which system is naturally easy to stick to in the long run?

I guess it's the same for sports, diets, etc

When I was in my 20s I could hold my daily ToDo lists entirely in my memory. This was useful for tracking coding features and bugs. Somewhat older now, I do this with a legal pad.

I spent a lot of time context switching (lots of roles, go-to guy for fixing things) so lists are a key tool in keeping me sane.

I've tried many things over the years but settled on Quip. The availability of the app on many platforms (mobile, desktop) means I can pretty much take notes anywhere (except the shower; I have pen and paper for that and transfer it to Quip later).

The shared notebook functionality allows me to easily organize my thoughts and share with others as necessary. This works for both short lists and longer documents. For example, I've built a fairly extensive document on HTTPS configs and best practices over time just by filling things in as I go along.

No relationship to Quip. Just a very happy user.

My company uses Quip and I'm very happy with it as well. Thinking of moving some of my personal notes and lists from Keep over to Quip. Although I'd give Keep the leg up for simple, quick notes on mobile (and their predictive entry for grocery lists is fantastic)

I'd say this article accurately describes my organizing. I'll start a todo list in Evernote when I get too many tasks. I'll knock of the highest priorities and the rest get forgotten because they weren't "really" important. After a week or two I create another todo list when new "high priority" items come up.

If no one is asking for something to be done, it wasn't really that important in the first place. I have hundreds of todo lists that are unfinished and I'll never do them. But, if someone does ask me for that a year later it just goes on the new todo list.

I combine this method with a LiveScribe Echo smartpen (Sky edition). This allows me to backup my notes via wireless but also keeps the human pen + paper touch to the notes.

I feel as though I remember things a lot better when I write them down versus typing.

I originally picked up one of these pens for college and it helped a ton with staying on track in class and always having a backup of the lecture that sync'd in an animation to my notes (so i could either play the notes back, or tap at a location and begin playing back from that point).

They have various versions but I would only recommend the Echo or the Sky - the version 3 in my experience only connected to the mobile apps, so on windows/mac you were not able to view your notes (very annoying). However the Sky (Echo with wifi sync) and Echo allowed me to sync the notes to a desktop app which allowed me to export pdf's. I hope they open up PC support for the 3 but after two or so years it looks as though they will never add that as a usable platform.

Interesting thread.

Wondering if anyone here has tried using shorthand, a.k.a. stenography, for to-do lists?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand

I remember people using it much earlier, and it was offered in a neighborhood typing class I took as a kid. Plus, had seen books about it then.

You may be interested in Quikscript, a writing system inspired by shorthand and intended to replace the messy English writing system.

Cool! Will check it out, thanks.

I feel like I've used it all - apps, plaintext, files+dirs, taskwarrior, ad hoc paper, bullet journal, org mode. I've used org mode many times over several years, but it only clicked for me as a system when I recently started using its capture templates and agenda views. If org-mode could be described as a system built on Emacs, it feels to me like task management with custom capture templates and custom agenda views is sort of a system built on org-mode. That probably makes it sound unnecessarily complicated, but it's actually extremely simple, fast, and reliable. I'm still using Apple's Reminders to remind me at 0900, 1245, and 1600 to actually check in with my system, but the system itself is working beautifully.

My paper to-do list is only immediate things (e.g. pick up 'script, dog to vet). Everything else is on the calendar (with reminders) and gets moved to the list when it's time.

Anything non-trivial, I put on my calendar. In addition to telling me 'what' I should be doing, it also tells me 'when' I should be doing it. I've found knowing 'when' - no matter how arbitrarily declared - is huge for preventing things from continuing to haunt me.

    > To-do lists get a lot of flack, 
    > but the simple act of planning 
    > has some psychological and 
    > productivity benefits all 
    > by itself.

My problem is that TODO lists are not necessarily a solid basis for planning. Specifically, they are often only good for easy plans.

If I don't write tasks in a TODO list I get anxious I'll forget about it forever. Even if I don't plan on doing a task anytime soon I like to jot it down so I have the freedom to forget about it.

Exactly this. It has been written to disk, and now your mind is free to compute away and use as much memory as possible for new things.

Indeed. That's the reason I liked the 'braindump' idea of WeekPlan.net[0].

http://weekplan.net/online-course-time-management/braindumps...

1) Get nuclear fusion working. 2) Make 'Project Orion' style spacecraft a reality.

Nah, see. They solve all the problems!

To do lists don't solve all the problems, but they might be a step in the right direction.

Similarly, entering the issues into JIRA might not fix them, but it makes getting the issues fixed more likely.

They're primarily about visibility and accountaiblity: step 1) Do this task, 2) time passes, 3) Why didn't I do this task? 4) sigh

Until making To-Do lists (not to mention evaluating different software, mobile apps, techniques) is just another way to procrastinate.

The best To-Do list is the one that gets you do the thing, even if this means not ever writing/using one.

I wrote a to do list manager https://github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks

I always create a list of things I did and that somehow helps me reflect on things I may have missed or could have done better. Not exactly a todo list but it works for me.

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