Everything Is a To-Do List

As a product manager, I’ve had the privilege of getting a glimpse into hundreds of people’s lives through user research sessions. Just when I thought I had seen it all, I’d discover yet another novel way people were repurposing decades-old products to fit their needs.

Photos Apps: People now use screenshots as to-do lists. One person even used their photo gallery as a password manager—arguably not the safest approach, but certainly creative.

Sticky Notes: And in so many colors! There was a time when every task I needed to do was written on a sticky note and plastered to the bottom of my monitor. I ran out of space, fast.

Calendar: To-do lists become time-boxed activities. This is one of my favorite ways to stay organized — if it’s not on my calendar, it doesn’t exist.

Email: A familiar one. People send themselves emails, write to-dos in drafts, mark emails as unread, or label them to create a makeshift task list.

Chat Apps: This one intrigues me because it mirrors email behavior. From sending messages to self, to marking them as unread. And app makers have taken notice—WhatsApp even nudged me with a tooltip suggesting I send messages to myself as reminders. We also frequently text our partners things like, “Just sending this so I don’t forget later.”

Notes & Documents: From Apple Notes to Google Docs—you name it. People use documents and notes not just to write but to organize their lives.

Spreadsheets: The tool of choice for project managers. In my experience, spreadsheets are used more often for makeshift task tracking than for structured data storage.

Scraps of Paper: I’m guilty of this one. I tear bits of paper from random notepads to jot down tasks, then spend the rest of the day trying (and failing) to keep them crease-free long enough to cross things off.

Asking Other People: A classic: “Can you remind me to do this tomorrow?”

To-Do Apps: And, of course, the dedicated to-do list apps—so many of them! We’ve been at this for decades, yet no one seems to have fully “cracked” the humble to-do list. From Superlist to Monday.com, there’s an entire industry worth billions built around helping people track tasks.

The Pattern

People naturally use the apps they engage with daily as their to-do lists. Why? Because it ensures it will be in sight tomorrow, reducing the risk of forgetting it.

People Love Hoarding Information

We bookmark posts, save articles, refuse to delete emails, and buy books we know we’ll never get around to reading. Just having information within reach gives us a sense of control. Often I have seen to-do lists just link to information storage with no explicitly associated action. You’d think that carrying around devices more powerful than the computers that took humans to the moon—devices that can search the depths of human knowledge in an instant—would cure us of this instinct. But it hasn’t.

A Lesser-Known Product Hurdle

Product, research, and design teams often focus on competing with big kids on the block or the latest VC-funded rival but overlook the real challenge: the hacks users have already put in place. It’s not just about changing habits, which is hard enough—it’s about prying people away from a system they built themselves. A system they probably take pride in.

Procrastination and Stress

Somehow, the explosion of productivity tools has made us put off quick tasks—scheduling a meeting, buying detergent on Amazon—because we assume we’ll get to them later. Marking the email about scheduling the email as unread is easier and allow us to defer the also relatively easy task of putting the meeting in calendar for later. These small things pile up, and the to-do list grows and grows.

Worse, we tend to tackle the small, easy tasks first, postponing the important (but often difficult) ones. We let the satisfaction of crossing something off seduce us into a false sense of progress. Rolling down the hill instead of climbing up it, both are about making progress, just depends on the perspective. But not everything is worth doing—especially when it comes at the expense of what truly matters.

Despite all our tools, hacks, and apps, we’re still figuring out how to manage our to-dos. While I want to say “Maybe the problem isn’t the system—it’s us.” I do think it is the system because it has let us procrastinate, allowed our to-do list to proliferate, and in some cases focus on measuring progress instead of working on the tasks.

If I could share and personally stick to one piece of advice, it would be - limit the to-do list to five things. Cross something off to make room for something new. Less is more.