[Bakary]

There's the notorious productivity swamp that is caused by the obsession with optimizing productivity without thinking about the actual purpose behind it. This is multiplied by the ease and incentive of creating and publicizing productivity software and articles that are consumed by people in a perpetual state of insatisfaction. The result is a psychologically advanced form of procrastination and a futile attempt at control that stems from fetishizing technology.

To-do lists are for things that aren't a real priority, otherwise you would be giving them your full attention and the tracking would be unnecessary. At most, it's helpful to track administrative minutiae. If you give something your full attention, tracking will seem like a non-sequitur.

Despite all of this, I have been finding the card system outlined here to be quite useful. The key for me however was to keep to a physical pen and paper version. Keeping notes exclusively online used to prevent me from being able to address them regularly with a clear mind. Forcing myself to synthesize ideas and refer to them again has helped me move forward in projects important to me. It's not the act of writing the note that is important, but the mindset towards having ideas that you want to develop.

Ultimately, most important aspects of life are beyond any productivity hack. You can't hack meaningful relationships other than by growing as a person, nor can you hack the strength to work on things that matter every day.

In a sense, the ultimate hack is to come to terms with your mortality and use this as an impulsion to focus on what really matters to you.

[Shank]

> To-do lists are for things that aren't a real priority, otherwise you would be giving them your full attention and the tracking would be unnecessary.

I really suggest looking at the Eisenhower Matrix. Urgent and important tasks are the only types of tasks that really go into the category of "real priority." Todo lists are best used to manage tasks that are important, but either aren't as urgent as the most urgent tasks, or are blocked by some outside factor that you can't control.

It's important to finalize insurance plans for the upcoming year, but waiting until it's "urgent" may result in not having enough time to find the best plan.

Granted, maybe you don't have a problem keeping track of all important tasks -- in which case, that's awesome!

[kurko]

> To-do lists are for things that aren't a real priority, otherwise you would be giving them your full attention and the tracking would be unnecessary.

I disagree with this bit, but perhaps it’s because “real priority” is vague. To-do lists offload tasks from memory to ensure we don’t forget them. It’s totally possible for something to be a “real priority” (whatever definition) and someone forgetting about it.

Don’t confuse priorities with memorization.

[TeMPOraL]

> To-do lists are for things that aren't a real priority, otherwise you would be giving them your full attention and the tracking would be unnecessary. At most, it's helpful to track administrative minutiae. If you give something your full attention, tracking will seem like a non-sequitur.

There's only so many things you can handle yourself. Todo lists are essentially the archetype of your second brain. They not only let you remember the non-urgent (but likely important) tasks, they also help you manage multiple urgent-and-important tasks, and in particular large urgent-and-important tasks. When such task is too big to fit in your head, you break it down into pieces digestible by your brain. A todo list lets you tackle bigger tasks, that break into more pieces, and/or tackle more of such tasks.

> You can't hack meaningful relationships other than by growing as a person, nor can you hack the strength to work on things that matter every day.

Hold my beer while I cross off the task of buying tickets to an event my wife wants to go to, because as much as I want to remember it, it's one of those things that are both important for a meaningful relationship and too easy to slip out of one's head under barrage of everyday churn.

> In a sense, the ultimate hack is to come to terms with your mortality and use this as an impulsion to focus on what really matters to you.

I wish this worked, but the brain adjusts and compensates even for memento mori.

[Bakary]

The finer details aren't that important: it's up to each individual to find the mix that works for them. The only general danger is mistaking fetishism of the tool with using the tool for some fully intentional purpose. Beyond that, there can also be the risk of misidentifying tasks as important when they aren't necessarily so in the grand scheme of what a person seeks out of life. These two black holes tend to be the consequence of trying to exert control over the world while ending up simulating it instead.

>I wish this worked, but the brain adjusts and compensates even for memento mori.

Wouldn't this be a self-fulfilling prophecy? Even if you aren't feeling the understanding of mortality in the moment, you can still draw from the memory and awareness of its existence and your relation to it. You still have choices available to you that can't simply be ignored by neurological hand-waving. And if it turns out we don't have such choices, then the entire thing never mattered to begin with.

[fenja]

> To-do lists are for things that aren't a real priority, otherwise you would be giving them your full attention and the tracking would be unnecessary. At most, it's helpful to track administrative minutiae. If you give something your full attention, tracking will seem like a non-sequitur.

This is not true for humans with deficits in memory or attention, which is a common problem in a world of constant distraction. Even when the majority of the articles and techniques is geared towards people with underlying problems that should be fixed first, it doesn't mean the gained knowledge and functionality is useless to everyone.

[armatav]

This is one of the best posts I’ve seen on this forum.