Todo Lists Delegate Work Away From Your Conscious Mind

[S_Emiya]

@anonymous90

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.)

I think that part sounds best in the second person. I want to address the reader (someone interested in getting tasks done) and tell them why I think todo lists are a bad habit.

@anonymous90

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).

I thought the point of Elliot’s article was that offloading work from your mind is good. A common way to do this is todo lists, which I think are a bad idea. I’m trying to provide a better alternative to achieve the desired outcome.

I would be interested to hear more about why you think my post isn’t on topic. I don’t want to create unnecessary moderation work for Elliot. But I thought a criticism of todo lists and providing an alternative would be a good thing to post.

@anonymous90

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.

Your criticism would be very appreciated.

@anonymous90

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

I’m not sure if this is a good analogy, apologies in advance. But I think of it like scalars and vectors. They can both have magnitudes, but vectors have an added direction component. Calendars are like todo lists but with an added time allocation component.

@anonymous90

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

That’s fair. I think in a standard todo list there’s some implication that you want to get the tasks done. Whereas with the “later” list the implication is that the tasks don’t need to get done at all, and you should expect most of them to not get done. So it’s more like a list of things you should not actively work on. If you need the task to get done, do not put it on the later list.

@anonymous90

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 did give one example of when I would use a “todo” list over a calendar. I think that in general, you should book tasks in your calendar instead of using todo lists. I would be interested to hear your counter-examples.

@anonymous90

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.

I think the article was partly about how to use todo lists and the benefits they can give. There are a lot of tips specifically for using todo lists:

@Elliot

For todo lists to work, you have to check them at the right time. Most commonly this means having a habit of checking them regularly.

@Elliot

When should you check your todo list? It depends. A typical answer is: in the morning, in the evening, and several times in between.

@Elliot

A good habit is to check your todo list after finishing a task, before deciding what to do next.

@anonymous90

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.

I did reference Elliot’s concept of offloading things from your brain in my post:

@S_Emiya

Delegate the mental load of time allocation to your calendar.

I agree that offloading things from your mind is good. I think that todo lists are an incomplete solution to the problem of offloading your tasks.

Thanks for your response.