A bottomless list is not a practical form of organization

Digital tools that promise organization, like to-do managers and the like, tend to offer bottomless lists as the standard container.

In such a model, adding an item is easy (just type it out), while removing it is considerably harder (perform the action/task, then check it out). Overall, an easy, unbound list capacity shifts the burden of discipline from doing what's needed to only writing down what needs to be done. ¹

This is problematic, because any "primary" actionable list tends to lose its value as it becomes filled with secondary tasks that never make their way back up (hello to every client's Jira backlog). Once a list is filled with enough lower-priority tasks, it becomes a secondary list, and people tend to create another, different list, that captures the "true" primary tasks.

One moves to a new to-do app, creates a new email address or adopts that new, finally right, Notion template that's going to change everything. Except that the main feature is probably that it's an empty list – an absence of baggage.

The way I address this, personally, is that my short- and mid-term planning happens on paper, in what looks like a bullet journal if you squint a bit. Paper has two desirable characteristics this way:

• There's a finite amount of space to write things for a given time (in a day, in a week)
• Items that stick around week after week have to be manually transferred every time. If they fall in relevance, they eventually disappear.

This particular choice of tool is clearly an answer to my own strengths and shortcomings. I prefer tidy andfocused action lists, I don't mind the paper journal tedium, I'm great at holding a vision/direction but very poor at specific long-term planning.²