Todon’t

Jeff Atwood posted another one of his controversial, opinionated articles on his blog, this time about To-Do lists. It’s a long rant about the failure of To-Do lists.

As a former Remember The Milk user and fan, I can totally relate. I just stopped using To-Do lists altogether a couple years ago. I just didn’t need them anymore – I knew what I needed to do most of the time:

If you can’t wake up every day and, using your 100% original equipment God-given organic brain, come up with the three most important things you need to do that day – then you should seriously work on fixing that.

But the truth is: I’m still using some form of list, especially since Trello came around. It took me a while to realize the difference between the Getting-Things-Done-ish productivity I tried to achieve in the past, and the more zen-like – and effective – process I have now.

Patrick Rhone eventually wrote it for me:

[…] increasingly, my to do list is full of the things I park there that otherwise get in the way of what I’m actively focused on.

My To-Do lists (hosted on Trello) are filled with stuff I don’t want to do right now, but need to remember for later. I know what I need to be working on right now, but I may forget about stuff I may want to do later. It’s more like a notebook than a To-Do list, really, but the To-Do list format makes it easier to cross things out if they become invalid or if I already did it.