The To-Do List Problem

Do you keep a to-do list, or is it something you haven’t gotten around to? How much of your to-do list do you usually end up doing?

You write down ten things, do three, and the next morning copy out the same seven and add three more. No instrument is loved more, or finished less.

Key concepts

The Planning Fallacy: The tendency to underestimate how long a task will take and how many of them will fit in a day, even when you have been wrong about the identical task before. It is why the list overflows: it was written for the best case, and reality charges its ordinary price.

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What to know

01
How much of your list do you usually end up doing? Less than it holds, permanently — and that is a forecasting result, not a character result. The planning fallacy stuffs the list at the moment of writing, so an unfinished list is mostly evidence about the person who wrote it that morning.

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Across subjects

Computer science named this failure: starvation. A processor runs one job at a time, so a scheduler picks what's next — and a low-priority job can be bumped

Theme connection

"Are We There Yet?"

A to-do list asks the question all day, and the honest answer is 'no, and there's more now than this morning.' Helpful or harmful? One side says essential: lists externalise memory and force priorities. The other says they backfire: an overflowing list breeds guilt and measures you against a line you can never cross.

Practice — a sample

SCIA to-do app adds a bar showing what share of the list is done. The MOST likely result is —

A A late surge
B A full bar
C Fewer items added
D Short tasks first
E Better estimates

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