One year of keeping a tada list
Sometimes called a to-done list.
A tada list, or to-done list, is where you write out what you accomplished each day. It’s supposed to make you focus on things you’ve completed instead of focusing on how much you still need to do. Here is what my tada lists look like:
I have a page for every month. Every day, I write out what I did. At the end of the month, I make a drawing in the header to show what I did that month. Here are a few of the drawings:
In January, I started a Substack, made paintings for friends, and wrote up two Substack posts on security.
In February, I learned took a CSS course and created a component library for myself.
In March, I read a few books, worked on a writing app, took a trip to New York, and drafted several posts on linear algebra for this Substack.
(If you’re wondering where these posts are, there’s a lag time between draft and publish, where I send the posts out for technical review and do a couple of rounds of rewrites).
Pros
I don’t really spend much time celebrating my accomplishments. Once I accomplish something, I have a small hit of, “Yay, I did it,” before moving on to, “So, what else am I going to do?” For example, when I finished my book (a three-year-long effort), I had a couple of weeks of, “Yay, I wrote a book,” before this became part of my normal life, and it turned into, “Yes, I wrote a book, but what else have I done since then?”
I thought the tada list would help reinforce “I did something!” but it also turned into “I was able to do this thing, because I did this other thing earlier”. I’ll explain with an
example
For years I have been wanting to create a set of cards with paintings of Minnesota, for family and friends. The problem: I didn’t have many paintings of Minnesota, and didn’t like the ones I had.
So I spent 2024 learning a lot about watercolor pigments, and color mixing hundreds of greens, to figure out which greens I wanted to use in my landscapes:
Then I spent the early part of 2025 doing a bunch of value studies, because my watercolors always looked faded:
(Value studies are where you try to make your paintings look good using black and white only, so you're forced to work using value instead of color. It’s an old exercise to improve your art).
Then in the summer, I did about 50 plein air paintings of Minnesota landscapes:
(Plein air = painting on location. Please admire the wide variety of greens I mixed for these paintings).
Look at how much better these are:
Out of those 50, I picked my top four and had cards made. Thanks to the “tada” list, it wasn’t just “I made some cards”, it was
Remember when I spent countless hours on color mixing
And value studies
And spent most of my summer painting outside?
The payoff for all that work was these lovely cards.
Another example
For a while now, I have wanted a mustache-like templating language, but with static typing. Last year, I created a parser combinator library called `tarsec` for TypeScript, and this year, I used it to write a mustache-like template language called `typestache` for myself that had static typing.
I’ve since used both `tarsec` and `typestache` in personal projects, like this one that adds file-based routing to express and autogenerates a client for the frontend.
Part of the reason I like learning stuff is it lets me do things I couldn’t do before. I think acknowledging that you CAN do something new is an important part of the learning process, but I usually skip it. The tada list helps.
Cons
Maybe the most obvious con: a tada list forces you to have an accomplishment each day so you can write it down, and this added stress to my day.
Also, a year is a long time to keep it going, and I ran out of steam by the end. You can see that my handwriting gets worse as time goes on
and for the last couple of months, I stopped doing the pictures.
In conclusion
It’s fun to see things on the list that I had forgotten about. For example, I had started this massive watercolor painting of the Holiday Inn in Pacifica in February, and I completely forgot about it
Will I do this next year? Maybe. I need to weigh the accomplishment part against the work it takes to keep it going. It’s neat to have this artifact to look back on either way.
Postscript
A few more of the several color studies I did:
Including another grid of greens.