The Amnesic Effects of Todo Lists

My personal todo list is chock full of tasks of relatively low importance. Why is this the case? Well, as I imagine is the case for most adults, I'm besieged by a veritable deluge of chores. Some of these are genuinely both hard to remember and important to do, e.g. renewing your passport before flying to Asia. These tasks are obviously high value to put on your todo list. However, if you wanted to keep your list pruned to exactly such tasks, you'd have to constantly be making judgements about whether a task belongs on your list. Making that many decisions is tough!

What's worse is that "how easy a task is to remember" is a moving target. One example of this is that ease of recall is a function of the number of tasks you're juggling. If you're anticipating a lot of chores in the future, it's a safer bet to just write down literally everything.

Ok, but what about just writing down important tasks? Even if we assume this is a stable and easily-judged target, which I don't think it is, the consequent list would actually still not be that useful. Todo lists aren't just there to prevent you from forgetting things, they also offload the anxiety of forgetting things. You can't effectively study for your interviews if you're also worried about remembering to buy milk next time you go to the grocery store and to do your laundry and to return that shelf that was the wrong color and to book an appointment with your dentist and so on and so forth. But, if you just dump all of those thoughts in a todo list, you can embrace the possibility of forgetting them, knowing that your todo list will be there to catch you.

Unfortunately, I think that following this practice can result in two failure modes.

The first is that, adding items to your list only allows you to relax if you have high confidence that you will actually process them later. To maintain that confidence, you actually need to do all those unimportant things that you put on your list.

The second is that, if the point of your todo list is to invoke some minor amnesia, and almost all of your activities are captured on your todo list, it can result in a feeling of like, "where did my whole year go, what was I doing, who even am I?"