How Jeff Atwood works

<p><pre><code> Do not under any circumstances keep to-do lists or use to-do apps. If you can't remember the most important things you need to do every day, you should work on that. And if you can't remember something you "need" to do, it's probably not worth doing in the first place. </code></pre> Wow. This is terrible advice. Sure it may work for some people who only have a small handful of tasks but for others who have a set of hectic projects (fix this, rewrite that, call her, email him) or even life goals (write a book, make a video game, learn to speak russian, teach daughter how to fight a bear) todo lists and goalsetting is incredibly important.

<i>No operating system I know of, no matter how many gigabytes of memory you have, can remember more than one copied item at a time. That's ridiculous!</i><p>Maybe I'm misunderstanding the functionality he's talking about, but hasn't KDE's Klipper (<a href="http://userbase.kde.org/Klipper" rel="nofollow">http://userbase.kde.org/Klipper</a>) and GNOME's Glipper (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glipper" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glipper</a>) solved this problem long ago? I'm sure there are other clipboard managers for other OS'es as well.

I'm the biggest advocate for plowing through every day like a tank but even I would be incredibly handicapped without a proper framework. My system is designed to keep all tasks and tactics out of my head so I can focus on strategy, vision, and execution. Folks who think they don't need a system are lucky, foolish, not all that ambitious, or have others worrying about the big picture of their lives/ companies/ industries.

Did the title for the submission not have enough room, or is there some other reason "Cofounder", which is what the original LifeHacker title reads, got replaced with "founder" here?

Interesting how polarizing Jeff Atwoods views about to-do lists are.<p>I believe that to-do lists are just a symptom of a different problem:<p>Working on something you do not really care about. (sadly, most people have to do this)<p>If you cared about the product or whatever you are creating, and the communication between you and your customer/boss/team is good, your goals would be aligned (in most cases), thus making it very hard to miss a really important task.<p>Probably it would have been better for Jeff to give the advice to try working on stuff you really care about.

I was really disappointed after reading the article. It was far too short, and contained no useful information. Actually, what is the point of such articles anyhow?

Why doesn't he at least give a nod to Trello when asked about to-do lists? Give your co-founder a plug!

Where's the bias lighting? <a href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/11/bias-lighting.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/11/bias-lighting.html</a>

Great, now I'm excited about that "awesome next big thing".

Disappointingly uninteresting answers :(