One year of keeping a tada list

Initially I kept my ToDo in a text file and I'd just delete things when I did them. Nice clean list of what's remaining, but after a few weeks I felt AWFUL, the list grew faster than it shrank, and it felt like I never made headway.

Now I don't delete things. I put a little + at the start of the line for anything I did, a - for anything I decided not to do, and a / for anything I did partially but needs to be revisited. I write a new list each day, carrying-forward items that I feel are worth revisiting.

And what's huge is that I can scroll down and see previous lists, years worth, and read all the stuff I did. It's enormous compared to the remaining todos, and apparently that's psychologically important.

I have had many accomplishments, and I've forgotten them all. When it comes to interviewing, I've forgotten most things or can't do easy recall that I can't even speak to them. I have no desire to change though; as long as I made those accomplishments is all that matters, it's kind of like giving gifts - I don't bother remembering what I did for whom.

I've been doing a work-oriented "what I did today" list for ~25 years, and really like it. Originally it started because I needed to bill for my time, but when I went to my current job (over a decade ago) I kept doing it. In my iteration, it is a concise sentence about each thing I've worked on that day. At the end of the month I go back through and review it and write up a "Wins" list.

It's surprisingly useful; I share it with my coworkers and we often consult it if we notice something has been behaving differently starting at a certain date to see what was going on then.

I keep it in a simple text file, running in a tmux on a server, so I have connections to it from my laptop and my desktop. It's currently 19,509 lines.

> Maybe the most obvious con: a tada list forces you to have an accomplishment each day so you can write it down, and this added stress to my day.

Maybe it makes more sense to have a box per week instead of per day. Or even per month!

At least in my own life I've noticed that focusing on daily output tends to be demoralizing, whereas if I look back over the months I am often amazed by what has come out of me.

> tada list

Ah I thought (and hoped) it was gonna be a list of epiphanies, interesting learnings, new sweetness. You know… taDA!

I have a spreadsheet where I keep track of excellent work that others do, things that surprised and delighted me, or difficult situations they handled with professionalism. Makes me smile just thinking of it. It will be useful during an upcoming review.

Love this, I’ll definitely give it a try for a while. I did something similar a while back but on a monthly basis

I kind of use my calendar to do this ... if I'm frazzled at the end of the week, it helps to see what I actually did as frazzle brain will have forgotten

Lovely paintings!

that's a nice practice that I do from time to time. Like when my inner self critic starts being too critical ("I'm not doing enough" kind of stuff), or doing things gets harder for some reason, I incorporate the routine of writing done things at the end of the day, and when the situation normalizes I stop doing it. It's usually like a month or two

I managed to do this for most of the first half of the year, and it was very rewarding indeed. Somehow it sort of dropped off, and something was lost, so I think definitely something to pick up again this coming year.

I am impressed that in this age of AI they still feel the drive to make watercolor paintings, to be honest.

Sadly, at this point I would not even call it a challenge, but I would consider it more a pastime.