> Please. I think a certain amount of humility is called for when making claims about how someone ELSE could improve his or her productivity.
Agreed. However this was just an indignant HN comment against Jeff Atwood who committed the sin orders of magnitude worse by beaming out this nonsense to his tens of thousands of readers.
Everything that Jeff said in his article boils down to spending too much mired in productivity porn, then overreacting and declaring that todo lists are useless and you shouldn't use them.
Everything that Jeff said in his article boils down to spending too much mired in productivity porn, then overreacting and declaring that todo lists are useless and you shouldn't use them.
Yeah, I happen to be one of those people who disagrees with Atwood on this particular issue. Sure, I get depressed that I can't do everything, and I was getting overloaded by all my tasks. And I won't deny that there seem to be way too many pieces of software to manage todos. But to say that keeping a todo list is worthless and give up on the whole idea seems like throwing out the baby with the bath water. Also the saying that "if it's important to you, you'll do it" might have a grain of truth, it's also very all-or-nothing black-or-white thinking.
If anything, I think that each person has to figure out their own way of managing tasks. For me, it was realizing that I can't do everything, or maybe I can't do everything right now, and just need to pare down my tasks or constrain my focus. Just because I cancel or defer a task (which takes it off my radar) doesn't mean it disappears. Text is cheap, and I try to capture everything, then prioritize from there; I end up archiving many, many things. Over time, I've developed a list of don't-forget-must-dos, in which I mix the occasional want-to-do. I'm horrible at keeping focused (or more accurately, if you break me out of my focus, I sometimes can't even tell you why or what I was doing!), so having a list I go down and check off is a lifesaver. Keeping busy also has the additional benefit of keeping the depression at bay. Ironically, the more busy I am, the less stressed I am; it's only when I stop to worry about what I have to do, or worse, if I didn't have a place to note things that need to be done, I worry about missing things.
> However this was just an indignant HN comment against Jeff Atwood who committed the sin orders of magnitude worse by beaming out this nonsense to his tens of thousands of readers.
I agree with your agreement, but it certainly would be an interesting experiment to try to train your brain to take back some of the responsibility you put on list. My memory is relatively weak, so I make lists of things I actually have to do, too.
I don't need to do that experiment because that's how I lived my life for the first 30 years! I only got into GTD because eventually my life did get complex enough that I did forget things and I did suffer mental anguish about personal failures as a result of not having a more robust system. The way I do things now is perfectly in proportion to my needs. I certainly don't read lifehacker or 57folders, and I am not addicted to productivity. I use OmniFocus about 20 mins a week, and I am a much happier person and definitely more productive on the deep engineering stuff because I don't have anything nagging at the back of my mind.
Jeff telling me I should stop using todo lists is like an alcohol telling me to stop drinking. No, you should stop drinking, I should drink however much I like because I don't have a problem with it.
Agreed. However this was just an indignant HN comment against Jeff Atwood who committed the sin orders of magnitude worse by beaming out this nonsense to his tens of thousands of readers.
Everything that Jeff said in his article boils down to spending too much mired in productivity porn, then overreacting and declaring that todo lists are useless and you shouldn't use them.