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Comment by trzy | Hacker News Reader

If your project TODO lists are stretching into years, it's time to get a better project management system. I recommend paper.

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This is unrealistic. If I didn't accept TODO items older than a year, or even five years, I never would have built my fence, fixed my stairs, set up my home lab, learned iOS development, digitized my family's old photos/videos, or innumerable other things, because for each of those things, I had 10 to 100 more mundane but more time-sensitive/higher-priority things to do.

You can manage long-term lists without losing items to the abyss by using prioritization techniques.

I'm pretty sure you're conflating two different types of todo lists - long term and short term. Paper is great for short term.

I feel that you're being unrealistic, not the parent poster: Turning every aspect of your life into a jira ticket straight up isn't healthy (I'm using "jira" here as a stand-in for "any process management system, digital or physical"). I don't feel that writing yourself a reminder to "fix stairs" is normal or a desirable process. At best: This feels similar to a CEO writing a jira ticket to "make website faster"; you've brought an unactionable outcome into process management, rather than the specific actionable steps (e.g. a shopping list).

I feel fixing stairs would be very actionable though, and something that I'd not remember other than when it almost fails under load or fails entirely.

I personally don't need a reminder to go off for a thing I need to do today or tomorrow, but something happening next week or next month that I need to check up on or arrange. Those tend to be the kind of expensive and really annoying thing to fix after neglecting

Absolutely.

If an item has been on your TODO list for years, it's most likely not worth doing anyway.

Might as well lose the paper upon which the item is written.

> I will lose it several times a day

This is me.

Skill issue notwithstanding.

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