Todo Lists Delegate Work Away From Your Conscious Mind

Why did you personalize this? If you believe that everyone should stop using to do lists, in all cases, then you could say that. Instead you gave specific (and pushy) advice about what you think another person should do, even though they didn’t say anything about a problem they had or were trying to solve. (Or anything personal about their own life, activities, problem situation, etc.)

This post isn’t engaging with the point of Elliot’s article. Instead you are writing an essay about your own ideas (that you got from Wolfgang Reck).

You posted in another thread that you want unbounded criticism. If you want unbounded criticism on your ideas, it would be clearer if you posted them in your own threads in unbounded. It makes sense to respond to other people and engage with them in their threads. But if you are going to write tangential essays about your own ideas, and you want unbounded criticism on them, it would be better to post them in their own thread in unbounded.

I do have a lot of criticism about your ideas in this post, but I don’t know how welcome they are, so I am going to limit what I say.

Calendars are a type of to do list. Using a calendar is using a to do list, just in a more specific format.

Ummm, that sounds like a standard to do list? I’m confused.

You give some reasons calendars are better than to do lists (in your opinion), but then in the end you still seem to be advocating the use of to do lists. I am guessing that you were assuming a specific context without naming it, and you think people shouldn’t use to do lists in that context. That’s really hard to respond to because I don’t know what context you are talking about. So any counter-examples I give could just be met with the response that to do lists are fine in that context, but you are talking about some other context.

I think that the standard to do list vs calendar debate is misguided. It depends on the individual and their context. There isn’t one type of to do list or calendar system that works well for everybody. That is why there are so many courses, blog posts, apps, and self help books addressing this problem: because the solutions that people propose don’t actually work for everyone.

But that isn’t what Elliot’s article was about. He wasn’t talking about exactly what type of to do list system people should use. He was just talking about the general idea of writing down your tasks, and offloading that from your own brain, instead of not writing them down at all. Some people don’t use any kind of written system to remember things. Instead of engaging with that idea, you seem to be implicitly agreeing with it, while framing it as a disagreement because you are going into details that were beyond the scope of his article.