Introduction
Sometimes, I find that things I add to my task list stay there for a surprisingly long time.
I add something because I think, “I should do this,” but then I miss the opportunity to get it done, and it simply stays on the list. When I look at it again after some time has passed, I sometimes find myself wondering, “Do I still need to do this?”
Of course, I'm not talking about things like work meetings or tasks with clear deadlines, where the necessity or urgency is obvious.
What caught my attention were the more ambiguous tasks, such as “I should do this when I have time” or “It might be worth looking into this.” I may add these to my list when they come to mind, but sometimes the opportunity to work on them never comes. Even so, when I try to remove them from the list, I find myself thinking, “Well, I might need this someday.”
So why is it so easy to add something, yet so difficult to remove it?
There may be many reasons why these tasks remain on the list, but one possible factor could be the status quo bias.
Status Quo Bias
Status quo bias is, simply put, the psychological tendency to prefer keeping things as they are.
For example, if changing something could potentially lead to a bad outcome, we may choose to leave things as they are, even if the current situation is somewhat inconvenient.
Something similar may be happening with task lists as well.
Once something has been added to a list, it remains there as something that we might do in the future. To remove it, however, we have to make another judgment: “I don't need to do this anymore.”
As a result, something that required almost no hesitation to add can somehow become difficult to remove.
Of course, not every task remains on a list because of the status quo bias.
Still, this tendency to find it easier to leave an existing state unchanged may be one of the reasons why some tasks remain on our lists for such a long time.
Adding Is Easy, Removing Is Hard
When I think about it this way, adding and removing items from a list may not be as symmetrical as they appear.
If I think, “I should do this too,” I can simply add it to the list. But when I remove something, I have to decide, “I don't need to do this anymore.”
At first, I thought of “adding” and “removing” as simply putting things in and taking them out. I assumed that the two actions would have roughly the same cost.
In fact, if anything, adding might seem more costly. You have an idea, think about what you want to do, and then decide that it is worth doing before adding it to the list.
But in practice, removing something often feels more costly.
When adding something, I can simply choose to leave the possibility open. When removing it, on the other hand, I have to decide that “I don't need this anymore” or “I'm not going to do this.”
In other words, adding can be done simply by keeping a possibility open, while removing something requires a decision to let that possibility go.
What looks like a simple matter of putting something in and taking it out may actually involve two very different kinds of decisions.
Conclusion
I've been using task lists as an example here, but the idea that “adding is easy and removing is hard” may not be limited to lists.
For example, the same thing can happen when saving files on a computer or smartphone. It is easy to think, “I'll keep this just in case,” and let the number of files grow. But when we eventually try to clean things up, we may hesitate because we think, “I might still need this someday.”
When something is easy to add, we tend to add it casually, and sometimes we add a lot of it. But if we also think about what it will take to remove it later, we may make slightly different decisions about what to add in the first place.
This turned into a somewhat rambling piece, but I wanted to take some time to put into words something I've been thinking about recently.
Thank you for reading!
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