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 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.
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.
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.