Hundreds of Ways to Get S#!+ Done—and We Still Don’t

A succinct review of the problems with productivity and to-do apps and why they fail.

I equally enjoyed this comment from HN

Good. When we die, we will still have a giant todo list, and that’s OK. That doesn’t mean we haven’t done things, it just means the list didn’t capture the entirety of our desires and goals.

Maybe the point of writing them down is mostly reflective; to contextualize them as much as possible and do the ones that we find most important by some unconscious heuristic. That means there will always be uncompleted things.

Also we have to see when we itemize things to do, we also objectify ourselves as a doer of those things. Which is OK for making things graspable, but ultimately we are not mere doer of things, we are humans in an existential context.

Maybe it is a good thing that we left todo items unchecked, maybe that is our protest against being reduced too much, maybe that procrastination is an attempt at gaining our humanity back, maybe that resistive Netflix binge has some unconscious meaning that needs to be honored. “