To do du list: a Duchampian productivity tool

24 August 2026 (The file burning stove, 2009) To du list is a single-page to-do list for people at the centre of the office-productivity/Marcel Duchamp Venn diagram (hi, both of you). It has strange behaviours, it deletes things, and you should definitely not rely on it. It saves to your browser, and nothing is sent anywhere. A to-do list flatters you that all work is the same size, everything equally doable, everything waiting patiently and indefinitely for you to get to it. After seeing David Tarbox’s unsuccessful pitch, I wondered if productivity tools could do with some of the same dada energy. So I argued with Claude about how we might reconcile to-dos, stale backlogs and things that never move into “done” with the ideas of Marcel Duchamp, dada and ’pataphysics. And then we built a thing. Sometimes tools rationalise work that is irrational, and maybe irrational work needs absurd tools. How tu du works There are two views: one more like a traditional to-do list (“the register”),…