5 Types of To-doers

Everyone creates to-do lists - whether physical, digital or in their heads. How people build, manage and act on those lists, though, is highly diverse - everyone has a slightly different style.

At Toodo, we've conducted hundreds of interviews over the last few months, to understand how to best build an AI-powered system that adapts to the way you work, rather than the way you think you’re supposed to work. Here are five of the most common "to-do list personas" we've encountered, and a few thoughts on how each one can level up.

1. The Planner, Interrupted: Intentional but sometimes overcome

Alice starts every day with a clean list. Maybe it’s scribbled in a notebook, maybe it's a carefully organized app. Either way, there’s a strong sense of ritual: she takes time to map out her priorities.

But then the day happens. Incoming emails, Slack messages, last-minute meetings. Her neat list quickly becomes an afterthought, as urgent new demands pile up. By the end of the day, she’s reacted to everything except the items she originally set out to tackle.

Key Challenge: Reality rarely cooperates with plans.

How to Improve: Build flexibility into your daily list. Identify 2–3 true "must-dos" and treat the rest as optional. Use real-time reprioritization (something AI can assist with) to adjust as your day evolves, not just before it starts.

2. The Over-Engineer: Planner, procrastinator?

Lars has a system. Not just any system—an intricate one. Nested lists. Color coding. Tags for tags. Maybe even a separate "plan to make a plan" document.

In fact, Lars spends more time designing workflows than actually completing tasks. It's easy to fall into the trap of confusing the management of work with the doing of work.

Key Challenge: Optimizing productivity becomes a form of avoidance.

How to Improve: Resist the urge to overcomplicate. Set a maximum planning time (say, 10 minutes) at the start of each day. After that, it's execution time. Let your tools handle the complexity behind the scenes so you can stay focused.

3. The Task Hopper: Knocking Out quick wins

You know this person—maybe you are this person. They open their to-do list and scan for something quick to cross off. Email a client? Sure. Update a spreadsheet? Done. But that big strategic project? That critical presentation? Those get pushed to "later" again and again.

Small wins feel good (and provide a hit of dopamine), but consistently avoiding hard work creates a long-term drag on progress.

Key Challenge: Favoring comfort tasks over impact tasks.

How to Improve: Reframe how you define a “win.” The most valuable tasks are often the least immediately gratifying. AI-based tools can help surface "high-leverage" tasks at the right moments—nudging you to tackle what matters, not just what’s easy.

4. The Cleaner: Take stock, tidy up

Alex knows he has a few precious hours to get stuff done. He has a long, disordered list, but needs some time to take stock of it. After that, it needs tidying (checking off tasks are already done or no longer relevant), new tasks need to be added before they’re forgotten, and what’s left needs to be assigned a priority, deadline, level of urgency etc. Only then - once everything has been neatly ordered, does his brain have space for work to begin.

Key Challenge: Finding the mental space to dig in and get stuff done.

How to Improve: Find ways to be more comfortable knocking tasks off the list, without needing to order the system in its entirety before work starts. Tools like Toodo can help with this; holding and ordering information for you so you can start work without worrying that stuff will slip through the cracks.

5. The Firefighter: Living (and dying) by urgency

For the Firefighter, every day is a triage unit. They spend their time putting out the biggest fires—chasing deadlines, responding to emergencies, moving from one urgent task to the next.

The deeper work? It never gets scheduled, because the schedule is set by the latest crisis. This can feel thrilling for a while, but it's an exhausting and ultimately unsustainable way to operate.

Key Challenge: Living reactively instead of strategically.

How to Improve: Build protected time blocks into your calendar for proactive work, not just reactive work. An intelligent system can help you distinguish between "urgent" and "important," and defend your focus when it matters most.

Why understanding your to-do List personality matters

Most productivity advice assumes one-size-fits-all solutions. But different people (and different days) call for different strategies. Recognizing your natural tendencies - whether it's overplanning, procrastinating, firefighting, or all of the above - is the first step toward building a system that works for you.

This is why we built Toodo. Our AI learns how you work best and adapts your task management around it. Not just by reminding you what you said you wanted to do, but by helping you course-correct in real time when reality inevitably intrudes.

The goal isn’t the perfect list. It’s meaningful progress, every day.

Why Toodo?

The way we manage and prioritize our to-do lists has changed very little in the last few thousand years. You wake up, think about what you need to do, write it down (on some paper, or a post-it, or a Google doc), and then struggle through the day trying to get it done, all the while being assailed by demands from co-workers, or clients, or noisy apps.

Execs in boardrooms and struggling musicians in bedrooms both scribble stuff down, try and fail to do it all, then try again tomorrow.

In the next few years things will change - the AI systems that help us generate images or search for answers will also revolutionize the way we prioritize and get our work done. That’s what we’re interested in.

Both of us care a lot about people - helping people get things done, and improving the systems that let them do that. We’ve done that in the physical world, working out the most efficient ways to route people or packages at Amazon and Uber. And we’ve done it in the world of work; helping people find new jobs and opportunities at places like LinkedIn.

With Toodo, we’re building a platform where AI can pull in all of the work you have to get done - from your emails, Slack, physical notes, whatever - work with you to prioritize it, and free you up to focus on what’s most important. Nothing gets lost, there’s always enough time, and instead of waking up every day to a blank piece of paper, you get a head-start on doing what matters.

58% of knowledge work is “work about work” - meetings, alignment, prioritization. Time spent being creative with colleague, or setting a new direction for a team or business, is essential. Time spent updating GANTTs, or mapping dependencies, is tedious.

With Toodo, we want to let you hand off the mundane stuff, and focus on what matters.

Ben & Mark