I love lists. I’ve sung their praises tirelessly. Lists help you feel in control, because you’re no longer relying on your brain to keep track of your to-dos; lists help you see your work more objectively, so you know when you’ve taken on too much. “What you need to do,” I’ve often found myself saying to stressed-out people, with all the zeal of an overcaffeinated Scientologist, “is make a list!” (“Thanks,” they reply, “but I didn’t actually say anything. Also, this is the quiet carriage.”) So naturally I responded with alarm to the advice of the time management expert Mark Forster, whose new book, Secrets Of Productive People, argues that to-do lists are bad, and that you should throw yours away.

Forster’s claim – which applies equally to back-of-the-envelope to-do lists, complex productivity systems, or “bucket lists” of life ambitions – is that lists are flights of fancy. Maybe they give you a feeling of control, but it’s a fake one. It’s far too easy to add to a list: an idea pops into your head, or a request into your inbox, and on to the list it goes, without your being forced to ask if it truly matters, or whether you’ve the bandwidth to do it. The ever-expanding list “refer[s] to a never-never land where you magically get time to do all this work”, Forster writes. Worse, it’s out of date the moment you create it – a record “of what you might have done or could have done at a point of time which is already receding into the past”, regardless of what’s possible, or important, to do now.

None of this, of course, will trouble that large portion of the population to whom it never occurs to make a list, and who simply get on with things instead. For us list addicts, Forster proposes a minimalist alternative system. On a piece of paper, write down only the five most important tasks you can think of. Then do them, in order, crossing them off as you go. (If you stop before completing one, add it again at the end.) Once the list is only two items long, add three more, to bring the total back to five. Then repeat.

The point of this austere approach is that you’re regularly required to ask what really needs doing, since there are only five slots. With a conventional list, there are unlimited slots – and it’s hugely tempting to plough through inessential tasks, just to cross them off. But what if you forget crucial things, using Forster’s method, because you didn’t write them down? His response: they probably didn’t matter to begin with.

I’ll be honest: I abandoned this after a few days, too worried I might be forgetting something vital. But I took the lesson to heart. The number of things you could do is infinite; your time is finite. So any system that lets you wallow in the fantasy that one day you’ll get it all done isn’t just useless but dangerous, lulling you into frittering away your time. I still keep a to-do list, but I regard it with healthy distrust. Life’s too short – literally – to do otherwise.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com