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Discussion on: Escaping the Guilt of the Never-Ending ToDo List

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dougmckechie profile image
Douglas McKechie • Edited

Ha. I often feel like this about my notes on Google Keep, I add stuff all the time but don't remove things that often and sometimes feel a little bad about that.

As for suggestions a couple of things come to mind...

1) Try to feel happy there are still things on the to do list; in work sense this means you have work on so are unlikely to run out of things to do and get bored, or are possibly not needed by your company any more because there is no work.

2) Move the "done" things to a done list rather than deleting them. If you lists are electronic such as in a Kanban or other ticket management system this can often be quite easy.

I recently felt quite happy when looking at all the tickets we had completed for a project even though there were still a number of todo tickets left over for the future.

If your lists are more for your personal life, surely at some point the things in the done list will outweigh the number of things in the to do list. You can reflect on the done things over the past year or however long and celebrate the progress.

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mary_grace profile image
Mary Thengvall

I really like the idea of having a universal "done" list. Right now I have them segmented into sections, and more often than not, the things that I'm accomplishing aren't actually on the list at all! But looking at the complete list of what I've done this day/week/month could be a nice way of reminding myself that even if it feels like I'm moving too slowly, I'm making a lot of progress.