Todo Lists and Procrastination

Two years ago I wrote a super simple todo package for Emacs to see whether I could get over my tendency to 1) procrastinate a lot and 2) being annoyed at my tendency to procrastinate. Reader, you won’t believe the answer: Yes and no. Or rather, no and yes. That is, I still procrastinate a lot (but less than before), but I’m way less annoyed about it. As you can clearly see from the Emacs mode line above, I’ve got 27 “new” things on the todo list, 4 things that are “in progress” and… tada! 616 things that have been done! It cannot be! I’ve had a look at other todo systems, but like I said two years ago, they seem to be specifically made to enable further procrastination: You can tinker endlessly with priorities, deadlines and arranging things in hierarchies. So you can spend an hour working on your todo list and then feel you’ve really made some progress. Which is a total lie, of course. And open sores todo lists encourage further meta-tweaking — altering the todo software itself, so…