When we do work, we usually have todo lists to keep track of stuffs to be done. I like todo lists a lot because I don’t want to remember all about them in my head. Eventually, todo lists should make you less worried about your work life (which I will discuss later).

Four years ago, I was introduced to Todoist, a highly popular todo list app. It was the start of my college, when everyone wanted to have an app for everything. I adopted Todoist as my todo list app. Over the last 4 years, I have been using Todoist pretty consistently.

Until last week.

I suddenly realized Todoist does not have an easy way to view the completed tasks in a day. In the app, users are always shown with things that have not been done. Once a task is checked, it instantly disappears.

The consequence of this on my mind is surprisingly bad. I always look at the “to do” list with constant worry and stress. Regardless of how hard I work during the day, the app shows me a bunch of tasks with varying priority levels and dues and notes. They are very intimidating. If there are 10 tasks in the beginning of the day, and I have completed 7 so far, the app never tells me that. All I can see are 3 tasks that are very important to be done, and I had better complete them or something terrible may happen. This issue with the lack of completed tasks has been discussed quite a bit in Todoist forums (link, link, etc.) but I see no responses from the team behind the product.

It gets even worse. For tasks that I have not done, sometimes I don’t even know where to start. They all look important AND complicated, taking a lot of time. Even though I had some (fragmented) free time during the day, picking a task to do takes a certain amount of mental energy to forget about other tasks and stop worrying about them while focusing on the current one. However, after I spend, say, 2 hours of deep work on it, I check the task on Todoist. Now, 2 more intimidating task to do. Not much sense of completion.

Now I can’t help thinking about how much joy I have missed over the last 4 years of not being able to see the completed tasks on my todo list. To be fair, Todoist has helped me a lot in my work. It makes sure I never miss any idea or thoughts, because I would just create a task very quickly at the moment, and the idea stays in the app forever except when I check it as done. My friends say I can remember to do things that others don’t. That’s thanks to Todoist. But remembering ONLY the UNCOMPLETED tasks, and be blind with all the accomplishments, was somewhat devastating. There were many times I looked at my Todoist at 3pm, knowing I have a few work hours left, and unable to start working.

What do I do now? I use pen and paper to keep my daily todos. At college, I used it once in a while and it generally made me feel much better for the aforementioned reasons. However, back then I was really obsessed with digitializing everything in my life. But now I don’t. I just want to save my sanity for the actual work.

To readers: How do you manage your todos? I want to know!