[dxjones]

re: the link to the youtube video of a Google talk about TODO lists ...

On the one hand, people's "TO DO" lists may seem trivial, but some of the key lasting archaeological artifacts have been lists of cattle and grain being brought to market.

Also, since the talk was given at Google, it is not really the TODO list of any one person that is up for consideration, but rather the collective of ALL TODO lists around the world and what information they contain and what they might reveal about the people who make them.

I am not saying the author who gave the presentation (and wrote the book) has it all figured out, but looking carefully at something simple on a massive scale is, in fact, what many startups connected to ycombinators are all about.

Rather than "people doing amazingly trivial stuff", we might say YC startups are "people doing amazing stuff with trivial things".