You're now changing that to "apps don't give you the benefits they promise - notably, calmness, clarity, a feeling of being organized". It's possible to have an overloaded Todo app and still be calm, calmly saying "I have too many things to do, good thing I have them nicely organised in this app so I can clearly see that it's too much and choose which ones to deprioritise". It's also possible to be stressed from having too many things to do. Or to have nothing to do, and still be stressed. I would happily agree that the advertising is trying to sell people on a calmness the app can't necessarily deliver, and if you say people aren't getting the calm they wanted, I can agree with that, - but that's a different dimension to how many things you chose to do and whether the app promised to put realistic limits on the amount of things you can do, or encouraged you to add more more more increasing the overall amount of things you wanted to do.

There probably is an effect where writing letters by hand is slow, a typewriter helps you write them more quickly, so it encourages you to write more letters - but if you didn't have more letters that you wanted to write, then you wouldn't write more letters, you'd just finish the ones you planned more quickly. The typewriter can't tell you whom to write to, or what you want to say, it can't encourage you to write more letters overall. If you want to write more letters than you can type in a day, that isn't the typewriter's fault. In that sense, a Todo app helps you keep track of more things, so implicitly encourages you to put more things in it, but if you don't have more things to do, you won't do that.

At the end of the day your Todo list can be a piece of paper and it feels fundamentally wrong to blame the paper for you having too many things to do, regardless of whether you are calm or have clarity or feel organized or not. You can't choose more things than you can possibly do, write them down, then blame the writing. The book organising system mentioned earlier, you can blame it if the books aren't organised after using it and it's a rubbish system and you can't find what you are looking for quicker than remembering where it is yourself, you can blame it if it promised to handle 1000 books but fails after 200. But you can't blame it that you have 1000 books, and you certainly can't blame it that you would have to read 5 books a day every day to get through your backlog before you die and that's impossible.

My first comment.

> To-do list apps advertise certain benefits. If huge swaths of people don’t actually get the benefit, that’s the to-do list failing to live up to its promise, at least for that group.

Seems like pretty steady goal posts.

I think we’re focusing on different things, what’s possible versus what happens. It’s possible to have a chef’s knife made of wood and cut vegetables with it. It’s just probably a pretty awful knife.

If you don't think that, we are talking at cross purposes. But if you do think that, talking about calmness, clarity, feeling organised, doesn't support that position. And on those parts I agree that TODO lists can overpromise and underdeliver (or can't deliver at all, ever).

I was mostly interested in the idea that when keeping todo items in you head you will naturally spend more time thinking about the ones you find important and interesting, and there will be a natural forgetting of the ones you don't remember without you having to choose to reject any of them - and using any kind of system forces you to face that you have too many to do and now you can't naturally forget. I only put the victim blaming part in to avoid people ignoring the main point and replying "sounds like victim blaming" "you're holding it wrong".