I’ve noticed a sort of tradeoff in how I use planning/todo systems (having experimented with several such systems recently). This mainly applies to planning things with no immediate deadline, where it’s more about how to split a large amount of available time between a large number of tasks, rather than about remembering which things to do when. For instance, think of a personal reading list—there is no hurry to read any particular things on it, but you do want to be spending your reading time effectively.
On one extreme, I make a commitment to myself to do all the things on the list eventually. At first, this has the desired effect of making me get things done. But eventually, things that I don’t want to do start to accumulate. I procrastinate on these things by working on more attractive items on the list. This makes the list much less useful from a planning perspective, since it’s cluttered with a bunch of old things I no longer want to spend time on (which make me feel bad about not doing them whenever I’m looking at the list).
On the other extreme, I make no commitment like that, and remove things from the list whenever I feel like it. This avoids the problem of accumulating things I don’t want to do, but makes the list completely useless as a tool for getting me to do boring tasks.
I have a hard time balancing these issues. I’m currently trying an approach to my academic reading list where I keep a mostly unsorted list, and whenever I look at it to find something to read, I have to work on the top item, or remove it from the list. This is hardly ideal, but it mitigates the “stale items” problem, and still manages to provide some motivation, since it feels bad to take items off the list.
I’ve addressed this sort of problem with a fairly ruthless “when updating my todo-lists, they always start empty rather than full of previous stuff. I have to make a constant choice to keep old things around if they still feel ‘alive.’”
I used to be big on todo lists, and I always had the exact same problem. I mostly hung out on the “keeping old tasks around for too long” end of the spectrum.
Now, I no longer struggle with this nearly as much. The solution turned out to be a paradigm shift that occurred when I read Nate Soare’s replacing guilt series. If you aren’t already familiar with it, I highly recommend reading it sometime.
I’ve noticed a sort of tradeoff in how I use planning/todo systems (having experimented with several such systems recently). This mainly applies to planning things with no immediate deadline, where it’s more about how to split a large amount of available time between a large number of tasks, rather than about remembering which things to do when. For instance, think of a personal reading list—there is no hurry to read any particular things on it, but you do want to be spending your reading time effectively.
On one extreme, I make a commitment to myself to do all the things on the list eventually. At first, this has the desired effect of making me get things done. But eventually, things that I don’t want to do start to accumulate. I procrastinate on these things by working on more attractive items on the list. This makes the list much less useful from a planning perspective, since it’s cluttered with a bunch of old things I no longer want to spend time on (which make me feel bad about not doing them whenever I’m looking at the list).
On the other extreme, I make no commitment like that, and remove things from the list whenever I feel like it. This avoids the problem of accumulating things I don’t want to do, but makes the list completely useless as a tool for getting me to do boring tasks.
I have a hard time balancing these issues. I’m currently trying an approach to my academic reading list where I keep a mostly unsorted list, and whenever I look at it to find something to read, I have to work on the top item, or remove it from the list. This is hardly ideal, but it mitigates the “stale items” problem, and still manages to provide some motivation, since it feels bad to take items off the list.
I’ve addressed this sort of problem with a fairly ruthless “when updating my todo-lists, they always start empty rather than full of previous stuff. I have to make a constant choice to keep old things around if they still feel ‘alive.’”
I used to be big on todo lists, and I always had the exact same problem. I mostly hung out on the “keeping old tasks around for too long” end of the spectrum.
Now, I no longer struggle with this nearly as much. The solution turned out to be a paradigm shift that occurred when I read Nate Soare’s replacing guilt series. If you aren’t already familiar with it, I highly recommend reading it sometime.