Declaring ‘To-Do List Bankruptcy’
Sometimes you gotta burn it all down and start fresh
Last week I had to take drastic measures in my organizational life.
I declared “to-do bankruptcy”.
I took my mammoth to-do list — a huge teetering pile of undone tasks — and burned it to the ground.
Why? Because it had grown Too Damn Big. For the last year I’d been using a simple app that lets me write all my tasks in one big text file. I’d organize my tasks into categories — like “household”, “Wired column”, “story ideas”, etc. Then I’d put a bunch of sub-tasks in each bucket.
Over the last few months, though, I’d been adding tasks at a faster rate than I was doing them. That meant my list kept on metastasizing, embiggening every week. By the time 2022 rolled around, my list was scores and scores of items long. I had to scroll down a couple of feet on my app to view it all. My “household” section had 30+ items; each reseach projects had dozens each; there was a “Misc” section that stretched to the horizon and fell off the flat earth.
When I looked at it, my head swam. I felt depressed. I knew there was no way I’d accomplish all that.
This, as it happens, is a well-known phenomenon in the world of productivity.
