I try hard to avoid "cognitive clutter". Having things on my mind that don't need to be is very costly; it takes up precious working memory and reduces how effective I am at achieving my goals. A manifestation of this is that I view completed tasks as clutter that should rapidly vanish from my attention set. I implicitly discuss this point in my previous post on my to-do system.
However, I've recently discovered a consideration that has swayed my opinion here. I get a lot out of "feeling productive". If I end my day and can really viscerally feel that I've gotten a lot done, I will feel a lot better about my day. In contrast, if I instantly evict completed tasks from my memory, I will systematically end my days with an underestimate of how productive I have really been, and feel somewhat worse about myself.
After noticing this, I've implemented the following two workflow changes.
- In todoist (my to do app), I've enabled the setting to not hide completed tasks in the day view. This lets me see them until the end of that day.
- I'm using todoist less and using lists of markdown checkboxes for tasks for my more coherent projects more. These don't automatically vanish. I discuss this workflow in my post on to-do systems. I still use todoist for most other things.
Overall, this has been a solid incremental improvement to my mood, and as such also for my productivity. I think I was wrong to previously instantly pop completed tasks from my attention set, and wouldn't be surprised if something closer to my updated way of working is better for others too.