Writing stuff down is something I learned to do in moderation rather than obsessively or not at all. There was a time when I discovered To-Do lists and I created and crossed them out obsessively but that later proved to be a major burden. It really wasn’t the time spent on writing the lists but the interruption to my work flow that was the last straw: having to stop what you’re doing and switch gears every time you needed to update your list ended up being a behemoth in terms of the time lost to context switching.

Nowadays I have a new rule when it comes to making lists: if I have to switch contexts to make or update a list, I will forgo it. The only exception is if I’m so overwhelmed that I’m likely gonna forget it. My thought is that my brain generally does a decent job remembering important things and the list is my way to enhance my brain’s ability to remember, not something to completely dump to which will just add unnecessary overhead.