Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

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Jeff is doing it wrong. A to-do list should be for things that you need to do, not thing that you'd like to do some day.

Here is what I do when I need to be particularly organized and productive. I call it a to-done list. (I'm lazy and probably have ADHD, so I never sustain. But whenever I do this it feels great, and it is never hard to start it up again when I get motivated.)

I start with a small list of things that I absolutely have to do, in roughly the order that I plan to tackle them. Put that in a plain text file. Write the date below that list.

Take the bottom task, break it up into subtasks, recursively, until I've got a task I can work on right now. Do it. Move it down off the list to the date. If I get blocked on that one, add the blocker below the task and pick another task. Continue all day.

The next day I start by putting that day's date above the old date, and then continue again.

The keys to this are the following:

1. I ONLY include things that I HAVE to do. (Adding all of the, "It would be good to some day" or "I'd like to" leads to depression as described by Jeff.)

2. Items are SPECIFIC and SMALL. The goal is to constantly move them off the list into done.

3. Only include CURRENT stuff. If there is a project that is intended for 3 months from now, it does not go on the list.

This list serves 2 purposes. The bit at the top is pretty much a LIFO stack (I add at the bottom, take off from near the bottom) of what I am currently working on. So it is the whole, "I need to do Y in order to do X, be sure I get back to X eventually." And the long list at the bottom is a log of how much I got done, which makes me feel good.

If you try this, be aware that a quickly growing top section is proof that you're doing it wrong. Go through the top bit and ruthlessly prune off everything that doesn't need to be there. Yes, I know that some people feel good about taking a list of high level tasks and breaking it up right away to get organized. But really, this makes the list explode, and you won't do as good a job of exploding it out as you will when you are closer to actually doing that item.

The rule of thumb is, if you have trouble scrolling through the todo to the already done, the todo is clearly too long.

> Jeff is doing it wrong. A to-do list should be for things that you need to do, not thing that you'd like to do some day.

Please. I think a certain amount of humility is called for when making claims about how someone ELSE could improve his or her productivity.

For example, in my own practice (and contrary to the above), a to-do list has the most value to me precisely for things that I'd like to do someday, and not things I need to do now. This is because I need the list for things that tend to float out of short-term memory. I don't need it for immediate or high-priority tasks, because I tend not to forget those. People are different.

It's absolutely a fine thing to say, "This practice improved my productivity. I offer it to you, for your evaluation, in case you find it helpful, too." But even if 95% of workers are more productive with practice X, maybe I am a member of the 5% minority that is more productive with practice Y. It is silly to assume that given various ways of approaching a problem, there is ONE way that will better for 100% of people .

Being a professional means I own the responsibility for deciding how to accomplish something. Sometimes a group needs to reach a consensus on how to do something, e.g., pick one source code control system, rather than letting each programmer pick whichever they think makes them individually most productive. But choosing a personal to-do list is personal decison.

> Please. I think a certain amount of humility is called for when making claims about how someone ELSE could improve his or her productivity.

Agreed. However this was just an indignant HN comment against Jeff Atwood who committed the sin orders of magnitude worse by beaming out this nonsense to his tens of thousands of readers.

Everything that Jeff said in his article boils down to spending too much mired in productivity porn, then overreacting and declaring that todo lists are useless and you shouldn't use them.

Everything that Jeff said in his article boils down to spending too much mired in productivity porn, then overreacting and declaring that todo lists are useless and you shouldn't use them.

Yeah, I happen to be one of those people who disagrees with Atwood on this particular issue. Sure, I get depressed that I can't do everything, and I was getting overloaded by all my tasks. And I won't deny that there seem to be way too many pieces of software to manage todos. But to say that keeping a todo list is worthless and give up on the whole idea seems like throwing out the baby with the bath water. Also the saying that "if it's important to you, you'll do it" might have a grain of truth, it's also very all-or-nothing black-or-white thinking.

If anything, I think that each person has to figure out their own way of managing tasks. For me, it was realizing that I can't do everything, or maybe I can't do everything right now, and just need to pare down my tasks or constrain my focus. Just because I cancel or defer a task (which takes it off my radar) doesn't mean it disappears. Text is cheap, and I try to capture everything, then prioritize from there; I end up archiving many, many things. Over time, I've developed a list of don't-forget-must-dos, in which I mix the occasional want-to-do. I'm horrible at keeping focused (or more accurately, if you break me out of my focus, I sometimes can't even tell you why or what I was doing!), so having a list I go down and check off is a lifesaver. Keeping busy also has the additional benefit of keeping the depression at bay. Ironically, the more busy I am, the less stressed I am; it's only when I stop to worry about what I have to do, or worse, if I didn't have a place to note things that need to be done, I worry about missing things.

> However this was just an indignant HN comment against Jeff Atwood who committed the sin orders of magnitude worse by beaming out this nonsense to his tens of thousands of readers.

I agree with your agreement, but it certainly would be an interesting experiment to try to train your brain to take back some of the responsibility you put on list. My memory is relatively weak, so I make lists of things I actually have to do, too.

I don't need to do that experiment because that's how I lived my life for the first 30 years! I only got into GTD because eventually my life did get complex enough that I did forget things and I did suffer mental anguish about personal failures as a result of not having a more robust system. The way I do things now is perfectly in proportion to my needs. I certainly don't read lifehacker or 57folders, and I am not addicted to productivity. I use OmniFocus about 20 mins a week, and I am a much happier person and definitely more productive on the deep engineering stuff because I don't have anything nagging at the back of my mind.

Jeff telling me I should stop using todo lists is like an alcohol telling me to stop drinking. No, you should stop drinking, I should drink however much I like because I don't have a problem with it.

> 1. I ONLY include things that I HAVE to do. (Adding all of the, "It would be good to some day" or "I'd like to" leads to depression as described by Jeff.)

I think there's value in having exactly one, unorganized, usually-hidden "someday" list. Whenever I strike one item off the "someday" list, I know that I am not yet drowning in MUST-DO's.

Also, it makes it frictionless to give up on a task and drag it out of the "MUST-DO" list into the "someday" list. And once it sits next to the Hawaii trip for a while, it gets even easier to delete it altogether.

>Jeff is doing it wrong.

Yes, indeed, I find I disagree with most things Jeff has to say.

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