Why Your Todo List Doesn't Work (From a Company That Sells One)

An honest examination of why todo lists fail — written by the people charging you $4/mo for one. We contain multitudes.

We sell a todo list. It costs $4 a month. You are presumably here because your current todo list isn’t working.

This is a situation that requires some honesty.

Most Todo Lists Don’t Work

This is not a controversial statement among people who study productivity. It’s practically conventional wisdom at this point. You write things down, you feel a brief sense of control, and then you don’t do them. The list grows. The list becomes anxiety. You abandon the list. You start a new list. Repeat.

David Allen has made a career explaining why this happens. His Getting Things Done system — GTD, for those who’ve spent time in that particular rabbit hole — argues that the problem isn’t motivation or discipline. It’s that most people use their todo list as a dumping ground without a reliable system for deciding what to actually do next.

The list captures. It doesn’t clarify.

You write “taxes” and feel like you’ve done something. You haven’t. You’ve written the word “taxes.” The actual next action is something like “find Form 1040 instructions on IRS website,” which is a different and more actionable thing entirely. GTD calls this the “next physical action.” The distinction sounds pedantic until you notice how often you skip over vague items on your list for exactly this reason — they’re too undefined to start.

The Eisenhower Problem

Dwight Eisenhower — president, general, alleged productivity icon — had a framework for prioritization. Urgent vs. important. Four quadrants. You’ve seen the diagram.

The problem isn’t the framework. The framework is fine. The problem is that most people fill their todo list entirely with urgent tasks and then wonder why they never make progress on anything that matters. Urgent feels productive. It has deadlines. It generates emails. Important is quieter and slower and doesn’t chase you down.

A todo list with 47 items on it is, functionally, a list of urgent tasks with some important ones buried underneath. You will clear the urgent ones first every time. That’s not a character flaw — that’s how attention works.

The Eisenhower matrix doesn’t solve this. It just names it.

The Guilt Loop

Here’s the mechanism that actually kills most productivity systems.

You build a list. The list is too long. You do some things, not others. The undone items accumulate. Now every time you open the list, you’re not looking at your priorities — you’re looking at your failures. Every item is a small piece of evidence that you are behind, disorganized, and possibly not the competent person you present yourself as.

So you stop opening the list.

This is a well-documented phenomenon. There’s research from Bluma Zeigarnik in the 1920s showing that unfinished tasks occupy mental bandwidth — what’s sometimes called the Zeigarnik effect. Your brain keeps a tab open for every incomplete item. Enough open tabs and the system slows to a crawl.

The guilt loop is: list → anxiety → avoidance → more undone items → more anxiety. Most productivity tools respond to this by adding more features. Priority flags. Due dates. Projects. Sub-tasks. Integrations. Reminders. Color coding.

This is exactly wrong.

The Feature Problem

Notion, Todoist, Things, TickTick, Asana — these are good products. They are also, for most people, traps.

Every feature is a decision. Deciding where to put a task, what priority to assign it, which project it belongs to, whether it needs a due date, whether it should have subtasks — these decisions take cognitive energy. That energy comes from the same budget as the energy required to actually do the task.

This is the concept Herbert Simon called “bounded rationality” — humans don’t have unlimited processing capacity, and every decision we make depletes a shared resource. Behavioral economists have documented decision fatigue extensively. Judges give harsher sentences later in the day. Shoppers make worse choices at the end of a long trip. The phenomenon is real and robust.

Your todo app’s fourteen organizational options are costing you something. The cost is small per decision. But multiplied across every capture, every triage, every review — it adds up. Your productivity system may be consuming more energy than the work it’s supposed to organize.

Why Simple Might Actually Work

Here is the argument we make for our own product. We are aware of the conflict of interest. Make of it what you will.

A system with fewer features has fewer decisions. Fewer decisions means lower friction. Lower friction means you actually use it.

The research on habit formation — BJ Fogg’s work on tiny habits, James Clear’s Atomic Habits, the behavioral literature on friction reduction — converges on a consistent finding: the easier a behavior is to start, the more likely it is to become habitual. This isn’t motivational poster logic. It’s the actual mechanism.

AnotherTodo has five things you can do: list, add, update, delete, toggle. That’s the whole system. There are no priority levels. No projects. No tags. No due dates. There is a list. Items are either done or not done.

For some people, this is maddening. For other people — specifically, people who have tried the full-featured approach and found themselves spending more time organizing their list than doing things — it’s a relief.

The question isn’t whether a more powerful system could theoretically be more effective. It could. The question is whether you will consistently use it. The evidence suggests most people won’t.

The Tension We’re Not Going to Pretend Doesn’t Exist

We know todo lists mostly don’t work. We have just spent several hundred words explaining why. We are now going to ask you to buy one.

Here’s how we’ve made peace with this.

A todo list is not a productivity system. It’s a component of one. The failure modes we’ve described — vague tasks, no prioritization, guilt accumulation, feature overload — are real. But they’re failures of how people use todo lists, not of todo lists per se.

The people who use simple todo systems well tend to have a few things in common. They keep the list short — deliberately, aggressively short. They write specific actions, not vague categories. They review it daily and prune ruthlessly. They treat it as a tool rather than a filing cabinet.

These behaviors don’t require a sophisticated application. They require a habit. And habits, as noted, form more readily when the associated tool is low-friction.

There’s also a specific use case where AnotherTodo makes unusual sense: if you’re already using Claude, having your todo list accessible as an MCP server means you can ask Claude to manage it in natural language. That’s not a gimmick — it reduces the capture friction to approximately zero. “Add email the accountant to my todo list” is faster than opening an app, and fast capture is the piece most people skip.

So Should You Buy It?

We’re a blog post written by a $4/mo todo app. Our credibility on this question is limited.

What we’ll say is this: if you’ve tried complex systems and found yourself maintaining the system instead of doing work, simpler is worth trying. If you currently have no system at all, simple is probably the right starting point. If you’re a power user with an elaborate GTD setup that genuinely works — you are not our customer, and you probably don’t need to be.

The research on productivity is consistent about one thing: the best system is the one you actually use. That’s not a marketing line. That’s the finding. Nir Eyal, Cal Newport, David Allen — they disagree on a lot, but they agree on this.

A five-feature todo list might work for you. It might not. At $4/mo, the cost of finding out is roughly one moderately priced coffee.

We’ll leave it there.