ToDo lists are for managing attention

I've long had a fraught relationship with ToDo lists, because they're very much a double edged sword, but I'm convinced that much of the problem is that their fundamental value is misunderstood. In short: ToDo lists are not about remembering what you have to do, but rather they are about drawing your attention back to things that you've thought about (or want to think about) and decided are worth revisiting.

Consider the following possible ToDo list items:

• Take out the trash
• Pay taxes
• Buy Jim a birthday card
• Think through production monitoring for XX import job failure cases

"Take out the trash" is a nonsense item, because it's already at least part of the routine of throwing things away -- each time you throw something away, you should notice that the trash is getting full. If you make a habit of putting mundane shit like this on your ToDo list, then there's no end in sight. You'll end up with a list like this:

• Brush teeth
• Put on clothes
• Wipe ass (after movement, not before)

These items have no value on a list, because you don't need to draw attention back to them -- they're built-in. If building routines, then a different approach is warranted, which I'll talk in a different post.

"Pay taxes" is not nonsense, but it might still be a bad item to put on a ToDo list, because it's very time-dependent. Usually with taxes you're waiting for documents to arrive or maybe you're waiting to hear back from your tax accountant, and you don't want a bunch of stuff on your ToDo list that you can't actually do, because all that does is train you to not do the stuff on your list. This one should be a reminder that transitions onto the ToDo list once you have all of your documents and it's also near the top of your priority stack (don't train yourself to ignore your reminders, either. Once they fire, take some kind of action, even if it's rescheduling the reminder for some time in the future when you can actually handle it, as opposed to just letting it flag repeatedly).

"Buy Jim a birthday card" is a good item for the list, because it's probably something important that you thought of in a specific context that you might not think about again, unless you happen to follow a whole train of thought through. This is the niche where ToDo lists actually get their value: An actionable conclusion at the end of some train of thought where that train of thought needs to be refreshed again at some point in the future. Similarly, "Think through production monitoring for XX import job failure cases" is a great item for the list, because it fully describes the context of a train of thought and gets you right back into it.

I tend to keep one ToDo list per project or area of concern that I'm working on. This makes it easy to jump back into current issues quickly without feeling like I need to carry around all of the mental context when I'm not working on that thing. I keep my lists in markdown documents and then I have a program that I wrote that I use to tag them with a "todo" tag so that I can pull them all up at once.

ToDo items should also be a compliment for other kinds of notes, and they should generally just be an index into those other notes (a way of saying, "Hey, things in this context want attention").

Unfortunately, there's a big culture of using ToDo lists as a way of increasing your performance (EXTREME!!!), and they're not that, and trying to use them that way only leads to having a way to justify procrastination. They get their value by simply allowing you to take action on your own thoughts and ideas and not by providing some magic that elucidates what the most valuable tasks are; your brain is much better at that than an organizational hierarchy ever could be.

Corollary: The best format to keep your lists in is one that's simple and easy for you to understand. There is no magic in using a specific format. Lists are just notes. This reasoning also applies to the huge project boards that have firmly rooted themselves in corporate culture. While there is merit to being able to share your notes with other people in a format that you both understand, there is no magic to using one format over another. I think that most people would probably be better served by just using a big table than a ten level deep project boards that makes it impossible to find current priorities.

ToDo lists are also not for archiving tasks. Keeping a history is good, but when you're archiving tasks what you really want is documentation. A ToDo is a snapshot that says, "At this point in time, I think that X is worth doing", but it generally doesn't document any of the surrounding context that describes why X is worth doing. It's likely, especially if you decide to defer the task, that X actually won't be worth doing later. So, instead, write a note that actually describes how things work and what we think is valuable, and then let the future people decide which things are worth doing.