Is anyone else's 'to-do list' just a list of things they forgot they're doing?
I have 47 items in my todo list right now. I just realized none of them are things I decided to do today. They're all situations I'm in the middle of — a candidate I screenshotted last week, a customer I promised a feature to, a partnership intro I'm waiting on, a draft I never finished sending.
I never wrote "follow up with the candidate" because at 11am Tuesday the conversation was alive. By Friday it wasn't. But it's still on my list as a task, with no context about what stage it was at or what I was going to say.
The thing I keep noticing: my tools all want me to capture actions. None of them capture situations. I don't need a reminder to "email Sarah." I need to know which of the 12 conversations I'm in actually need a reply from me today, and what I was going to say when I was last in them.
I asked three other founders this week if they have the same problem. All three said yes. One said "I just keep a Notion doc called 'don't forget' and scroll it every morning, which is its own kind of hell."
So: is this just me being bad at tools, or is this a category of problem the tools we have aren't built for?
If you've got a workflow that handles this without making it worse, I'd genuinely love to hear it. Especially anyone who runs 5+ parallel situations at once and has stopped trying to write them all down.
The detail that stayed with me was that almost every example in your post started as something active and only became a "task" after momentum disappeared.
A candidate.
A customer.
A partnership.
A draft.
What I'm not sure about is whether those examples are all pointing at the same problem.
Reading this, I found myself wondering whether the frustration is coming from the tools themselves or from the way a completely different kind of thing eventually gets forced into a task list.
The situation was alive, then died, and only the dead version got captured" — that line is the actual mechanism. I've been describing the symptom (I forgot the stage). You named the cause.
The tools-vs-paradigm question is one I'm genuinely uncertain about. If the cause is the list primitive itself, then the solution is a different primitive (threads, maybe). If the cause is the tools, then better tools would solve it. My bias is the first one but I want to test it.
One question for you, since you're the one who asked it: when you look at your own work, do you ever catch yourself trying to write a thread as a task? Like, the moment you typed "follow up with X" into your todo, did you feel the situation going from alive to dead right there? Or does that not match your experience?
I’ve seen that pattern, but I don’t think it’s something you can fully judge in-thread without running it against real examples.
If you want, you can share a couple of concrete cases and I can respond properly over email where it’s easier to go deeper on the actual breakdown.
This resonates with me
I have noticed that many important things are not really tasks at all, they are ongoing conversations, relationships, or opportunities that evolve over time
Once they get reduced to a todo item like "follow up with X" most of the context disappears. The hard part isn not remembering to send a message, it's remembering why the conversation mattered in the first place and what happened last
It feels like most tools are optimized for action management, while a lot of real work is actually situation management
The hard part isn't remembering to send a message, it's remembering why the conversation mattered in the first place and what happened last" — that's the cleanest articulation I've read of the problem I've been sitting with.
The thing that pushed me to start building something for it was a specific failure mode: I had a candidate screen on Tuesday, by Friday I'd genuinely forgotten what I told them about comp. The conversation was alive mid-week and dead by Friday, and my tools didn't catch that. They wanted me to capture the action. But the action had no meaning without the context.
One thing I'd genuinely love your read on: when you say "situation management" — does your mental model treat each conversation as a separate thing (one thread per person / one thread per project), or do you group them (one thread per goal that spans multiple people)? I've been building it as the former but I'm not sure that's right. Curious which frame matches how you actually think.