Comment by coremoff

They help me. At least the physical, paper ones do.

I keep my days on track by taking time in the early morning and reviewing the previous days accomplishment/misses/notes and then writing down an outline of today's goals and reminders. Notes throughout the day get jotted in the margins. Something like maybe 70% blogging, 30% to-do list?

Can't say I've ever used an app that felt 1/8th as helpful. It feels like there's some extra brain magic going on in the process of putting thoughts on actual paper that results in more retention and effort of thought put into writing.

For me the most important function of a todo list is to remind me what I am supposed to be doing _right now_. I often get distracted and veer off to do something else, but a quick glance at the top of my todo list gives me that little nudge to go back. Anything further down the todo list will possibly stay undone.

Yeah, prioritizing tasks is also part of the problem for me. I use the TickTick app to save my tasks and it has a feature called the Eisenhower Matrix, which allows me to prioritize my tasks in a visual way like a kanban board. Sometimes that's not enough. Keeping to a schedule to form a habit is also a challenge, so I prepend a number to the most important tasks and set up reminders for them. Once I have the big tasks laid out in the app, I revert to old school pen and paper to break the tasks down into smaller parts because it's faster and reduces friction.

Maybe that sounds like overkill, but I've found that having a system for writing down tasks, prioritizing them, and creating a daily schedule/habit are all equally important for people with ADHD.

    and then they become a separate problem all of their own 

I struggle with it too.

There are an infinite number of possible todo systems and different systems will work for different individuals at different times. But, I do feel there are two immutable truths w.r.t. successful todo list tasking.

1. You have to aggressively prioritize and prune them.

2. You should have separate daily/weekly/monthly/"someday" lists. Or some variation on this them. Maybe you do weekly/monthly/someday. Or today/tomorrow/someday. Whatever.

Point is it can't be a single infinitely expanding list or multiple infinitely expanding lists. Otherwise it's just a giant guilt pile that is 50% full of crap you don't even care about any more.

I still struggle but I think embracing those two principles is table stakes

I used to think they didn't. It is entirely pointless and even something of a distraction if it's something that's currently part of my hyperfocus/obsession.

If it's something I might forget (e.g. an admin task), then if I don't put it in a list and have either a habit to pluck it out of the list or a reminder prompting me then it is usually forgotten.

I also rely very much more heavily on checklists (especially templated checklists) than the average person. If I'm traveling and I don't set a reminder for 7pm the night before a trip with a packing checklist then I will either forget 4 critical items or I will be frantically packing at the last minute or both.

Same for me. Todo lists don’t work for me at all

The only kind of todo list that does is a piece of physical paper with the items that I want to finish that day

Todo lists help me deal with tasks not worth doing. I feel anxiety over forgetting things, even if they're ultimately not important - it can be hard to tell what's important in the moment.

Putting it in a todo list allows me to let go of the anxiety of forgetting, because I know I'll triage and prune my todo list soon enough.

I find that for calendars and to do lists to work well, I need reminders to tell me to check the lists lol. Not great.

That's a feature of todo lists I think. Well, perhaps not for ADHD per se, but it's a way also to offload and let go of things. At least that's what I remember the lifehack character on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy said.

I mean the author in the article uses a to do list