Just remember. That's exactly the thing I (for example) am not capable of. I keep forgetting everything. Every time I have some spare time, I am checking my todo first if there's something I need/want/can do.
It is also why I am writing comments on the internet, to see what are other people life experiences.
Digital to-do lists are where tasks go to die.
I just keep on coming back to a nice notebook, a nice pen, and my variant of the Pomodoro method.
But yeah, not accumulating stuff requires a conscious decision and the will to stick to it. The same goes for paper, though. I have a coworker that at some point had a stack of paper over 20 cm high.
I also am becoming convinced of this.
The issue is that you can keep adding to them. And if you’re the digital hoarder type - hello, my friend Alex! - you can never delete the old crap. So now you have this utterly unachievable list of things that seemed like a good idea at the time. And which have lost context due to time, so now you barely even remember what you meant.
I introduced Alex to Things.app’s feature whereby you can mark a task as ‘Cancelled’. So it takes it off the list, but you’re not pretending that you did it. I hope that helps him.
Me, I use slips of paper and a pencil. On my desk the slips closest to me are those that I’m doing, or should do, now. When there’s too much paper, it’s obvious. Throwing away (by sticking it on the spike) a piece of paper feels good. It’s just a piece of paper.
Well you're lucky then, because I frequently have to remind people of important things they (still) have to do and seem to have forgotten. Having such a list is a way to avoid the stressful situation of being late with things you can't postpone or which you benefit greatly from doing sooner rather than later.
Additionally, some todo's have different timeframes than others. I try to think of things as short term/immediate, medium term/this week, and long term/nextweek-before I die.
I'll occasionally pick things of the long term list and cut them down into an action I could do immediate or this week, for example, get Anna karenina from the library.
hopefully obvious note that that simply isn't an option for anyone with ADHD.
I have the same problem as you, of remembering things I need to do. But I've not found todo lists to actually help, in fact I find if I take too much time to maintain the list, I have less time to spend doing the things I'm supposed to do.
Kind of like remembering phone numbers. I don't know anyone's phone number anymore, because I don't have to, because I have a place that I can store them all. The difference is that the phone dials it for me when I tap it; my todo list doesn't carry out the tasks I write on it, but it does help me to forget them faster!
It's some mixture of https://xkcd.com/1906/, https://xkcd.com/927/ and https://xkcd.com/1319/
That's how my mind works, YMMV.
I hate recommending specific apps, but after using OmniFocus for years, I started using Things a few months ago and it's been heavenly. It's not as powerful as OF, but has all the features I actually need and not much else. I'm not tempted to waste time making my workflow absolutely perfect and optimal instead of just, you know, doing things.
My biggest problem earlier was that I thought I should have a todo list to achieve things in life. As it turns out it just does not matter, my connections, my starting point in life was much more defining to what I can achieve today than any form of organization of my self I would implement.
Of course unless I would be totally undisciplined and disorganized, but it turns out that I was disciplined and organized enough to reach good life and adding todo list is not something that would help me.
That's a separate problem, and a good reason to have periodic reviews. If you have big items that stay on your list for weeks you should consider removing them or make them more actionable than they currently are.
Most useless part is priorities on personal list. If something like utility invoice is to be paid - just do it.
If it is something like "read Anna Karenina" it is not getting any priority ever it is just something I would like to do in my life.
So stuff that really needs to be done I will deal with without any todo list I will just remember it or deal with it right away.
Stuff that does not need to be done will not get done - and that is perfectly fine.
Different thing is if it is company "todo" list and I need to keep customer requests, well JIRA does the job.
In the end don't listen to me because there are many much more successful people than me, I am simply happy with what I achieved so far, maybe I would achieve more with todo lists but somehow I fail to see how these would help me in living my life.