In my experience, it's effectively terrible to just start a todo list for the sake of a todo list. You need some rules to manage it and especially clean it up. After trying a ton of things in my job the following works best for me : - Maintain todo lists for specific projects and developments (currently I have four) - Use only a text file. Everything more complex, like Outlook tasks, gets annoying and forces you to spend more time tweaking the task options than doing the job. - Every day before starting work, write up from memory everything you would like to do today. Sort between long-term and short-term. Write up important things in your to do list, and do the rest. - Every once in a while, go back to the todo list and clean up/move the things you did. If an item has been there for ages, it's not important so remove it/mark it as not necessary/rework it. - Don't look at your lists more than twice or once a week. You should know the short-term stuff by heart. With this, you should be able to have lists containing only the most important and up-to-date stuff. For me it works quite well, it helps me keep track of what I want to do in the weeks to come without having every minute item like single bugs in it.