To-do lists are interesting because they sometimes become commitments. Once you write an activity or goal down on a piece of paper, it's work undone.

Jordan Etkin

To-do lists can be very helpful for informing how you should be directing your time and cognitive resources, i think where challenges emerge is when people treat to-do lists like wish lists, rather than the things they definitely want to do today.

The more things people put on their lists, the more open they are to creating goal conflict and its sort of negative downstream effects.