Everyday Systems: Podcast : Episode 88

The Metaphysics of Todo Listing

The to-do list. It’s probably the oldest form of literary production, after the simple inventory. They were writing to-do lists on stone tablets in Mesopotamia. First they wrote lists of stuff, then they wrote lists of what to do with that stuff. I have no doubt that those cruel taskmasters in the book of Exodus were working from extensive to-do lists. And I think, even today, we hear an echo of the crack of their whips when we put ours together, using Asana, or Omnifocus, or Trello, or whatever our modern taskmasters (usually some horrific software system) require.

Now, todo lists must sort of work, at least sometimes, to a degree, or we still wouldn’t be making them. The pyramids and treasure cities did get built, after all.

But what about on a personal level, for you the individual? Maybe stuff gets done, but what do todo lists do to you?

Because there are people who tell you that todo lists are going to make you crazy with stress, that they tear you away from “the NOW,” that they reduce life to an eternal preparation, and a soulless ticking off of checkboxes.

How do todo lists reflect and affect your fundamental sense of reality?

That’s what I am going to talk about today, the metaphysics of to-do lists. And given that it’s Halloween, it feels appropriate that metaphysical also has an older, alternate meaning of supernatural and ghostly. Lady Macbeth talks about the witches' prophecies for her husband as “fate and metaphysical aid.”

But, spookiness aside, basically what we’re talking about here it’s the productivity guru vs. the mindfulness guru. We’ll leave the witches out of it for now.

So who is right? Who is wrong?

Enter Simone Weil, my favorite Jewish, Catholic, Communist, Mystic:

“Method of investigation: as soon as one has arrived at any position,

try to find in what sense the contrary is true.”

“One must accept all opinions, but then arrange them in a vertical

order, placing them at appropriate levels.”

In other words, there is truth (and untruth) in both of these positions, pro- todo listing and contra. And the mindful anti-todo listers don’t have a monopoly on the metaphysical high ground. We can learn something by examining and acknowledging the truth of both of them. This, by the way, is a very helpful technique in thinking about political positions you may vehemently disagree with, especially while they are being shouted at you. We motive mixologists know that all motives are mixed, and there’s got to be some valid element, mixed in there, that is worth paying attention to, if only to understand where the other side is coming from, but ideally, to also genuinely consider and respond to that valid concern.

The obvious truth in the contra to-do listing position is that todo lists are naive. Todo lists allow you to deceive yourself that it’s all really doable, that your tasks are not infinite, that you could really, someday, get it all done. But that’s silly. Your tasks will never get done. 10 news ones will rush in to replace anything you cross off. It’s like Heracles chopping heads off the Hydra. It’s only once you’ve cleaned the fridge that it occurs to you to look behind the fridge and God help you then.

As well as being infinite in number, in the grand cosmic sense of things, your tasks are also infinitely unimportant. Fast forward a hundred years, a thousand years, a million years. It will be as if you never existed. Soon enough, and it won’t take all that long, all your actions and non-actions will be not just insignificant, but essentially gone, dissolved, obliviated, as if they never happened. No achievement, no fame, not Steve Jobs’, not Shakespeares’s or Mozart’s or Marcus Aureleus, certainly not yours, will really make a “ding in the universe” and survive what time and war and asteroids and the sun burning out and mere neglect will throw at it. Quick: tell me one thing you know about your great, great, great grandparents. Tell me the name of one actual human being who was alive 6,000+ years ago. 10,000 generations of homo sapiens sapiens and one solitary name even.

As Marcus Aureleus himself put it:

“Near is your forgetfulness of all things and near the forgetfulness of you by all.”

You could argue that this is a little ironic coming from him, the philosopher emperor that we’re still talking about 1800 years after he died and who is possibly trendier than ever. But what’s 1800 years? Fast forward another few thousand, or less, depending on your pessimism level about various brewing global catastrophes, and his wisdom will unironically apply to him too. It’ll be as if he too, had never existed, Meditations, empire and all. He’ll be, as he insisted, in no better shape than the rest of us.

So don’t draw the wrong lesson from his or anyone else's exceptional fame and achievement: it’s all just a speck on eternity. Not even a speck.

Since that is the case, since we are all, even the most famous and amazing of us, about to be swallowed by double oblivion – give or take a few thousand years, though probably just a few decades – why are we frittering away this little flickering brief crack of life in vain, impossible, frantic struggle, ticking off checkboxes? It feels very foolish. It feels like the appropriate response to pointlessness is to at least recognize it. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” It doesn’t really buy us anything, this recognition, but at least it’s true.

You don’t have to be a nihilist to think this way. I don’t want to bum you out. And neither does Marcus Aurelius. He thought this bleak insight into the nature of the universe was a positive starting point, essential to waking up to what was truly important, not vain ambition but “doing what man’s nature requires,” as he put it. He wanted to shock people out of dumb ambition into embracing something real, or at least the need for something real, whether or not it actually exists.

Jesus, too, was constantly telling stories about the vanity of worldly aspirations. “Take no thought for the morrow” and “sufficient unto the day.” For Jesus, in the Lord’s prayer, and throughout the Gospels, there are two time frames that matter: today (“this day”) and eternity (“for ever”). The big mistake is worrying about the in between. All kinds of people are always coming up to him and asking “master, what should I do? What should I add to my todo list to achieve salvation?” And his response is basically, “give up.” Sometimes he’ll say first, almost as a sort of joke, “have you tried being perfect? Have you tried adding the infinite to your to-do list?” before coming to “actually, just give up, on the deepest level, give up, and accept God’s grace.” People say Jesus didn’t have much of a sense of humor but I disagree – it’s just very deadpan.

OK, now that I’ve gotten Jesus and the Stoics and the Nihilists to agree that todo lists are bad, what’s in the pro column?

The metaphysical danger of todo lists, as we’ve seen, is that they can make you complacent about your cosmic insignificance – the starting point for all wisdom.

Their advantage kicks in when you become all too convinced of it, when you are overwhelmed and terrified and depressed by your nothingness and just stuck, when you need to put on blinkers and just stumble on somehow. The wisdom is crushing you. You’re in a thick fog and you can’t see over the next hill. It’s precisely when the big picture seems hopeless and pointless that you need that little picture “what next?”

“Todo Lists Are Your Salvation,” I tell myself when I’m in a state like this. I’ve been there, and said it often enough that I have an acronym for it: “TLAYS.” I may not be able to see the promised land, but maybe I can still see the ground two feet in front of me, so that’s where I make myself look. I can move one zombie foot forward, even without hope, if I write it on an index card. I can remind myself, “TLAYS,” and write a few trivial but necessary things on my index card. There’s nothing like it for getting out of bed in the morning some days.

But I also, other times, have to remind myself that the opposite is also true, that “Todo Lists Are Your Damnation” (TLAYD). Because as soon as the todo lists start to work, as soon as you actually start daring to hope, “maybe I can do it after all!” that’s what you’ve got to watch out for instead.

When you are successful, when things are going well, when you are feeling superhuman, you need to remember TLAYD, lest complacency and hubris make you stupid. Fortunately todo lists are great at self destructing. As soon as you can actually accomplish everything on them, you’ll add more. And then life will punch you in the face with something totally unanticipated, and it will all come crashing down. Then, when you are down and in the muck, when you are feeling barely human, demihuman, you need to remember TLAYS again so you can crawl forward.

I think there is something useful to be drawn from this antipathy. It’s not like TLAYS and TLAYD just cancel each other out and there’s nothing left. Both todo listing and not todo listing have something to offer, something to teach us, lessons and and anti-lessons for us to be on our guard against, metaphysically and practically.

You can’t really appreciate TLAYS without also appreciating TLAYD, and vice versa. They temper and actually strengthen each other. If you remember the other, at least a little, while you’re focused on the one, the cycle will be less boom and bust. Maybe you catch yourself before you hit rock bottom and ease into the opposite less jerkily when it starts to be time.

The word “salvation,” in both these acronyms, is a little excessive, a little absurd. But that’s intentional. It’s gallows humor: the requisite Everyday Systems comic note to make some necessary truths go down easier, and maybe just as important, the opposite, to use the wisdom as cover to smuggle in a little humor, to induce a little therapeutic half chuckle when you feel like you’ve barely got air to breathe, much less laugh. But don’t chuckle too much. They’re best delivered full Jesus deadpan.

There’s another metaphysical tension around todo listing, this one actually within todo listing: it’s the tension between prioritization and exhaustivity. Do we want to get everything done, or since that is impossible, only the most important things? And how much time do we want to spend figuring out what the important things even are? First things, second things, and zero-eth things, to speak like a computer programmer. But I’ve talked about that already in some detail in my episode on Timebox Lord, along with, believe it or not, a practical proposal for dealing with this tension in your daily life, which I continue to practice and find very helpful. So I’ll refer you to that episode and stop here.

Well, I hope you found some of this helpful. May you find the right balance between TLAYS and TLAYD, and between your first, second and zeroeth things. And may you have a happy and metaphysically satisfying Halloween.

Thanks for listening.

By Reinhard Engels