One Year of Keeping a Tada List

Aditya Bhargava (author of Grokking Algorithms, Second Edition) describes his experience maintaining a "tada list" (or "to-done list") for one full year -- a daily practice of writing down what he accomplished, as opposed to a traditional to-do list. Each month gets its own page, with a header drawing summarizing the month's activities.

Pros

Celebrating accomplishments. Bhargava notes he doesn't spend much time acknowledging what he finishes, quickly moving from "Yay, I did it" to "what else am I going to do?" The list helped counter that pattern.

Tracing the chain of effort. Rather than just noting the final product, the list helped him see how earlier work enabled later successes. He illustrates this with two extended examples:

1. Watercolor cards of Minnesota -- In 2024 he studied watercolor pigments and mixed "hundreds of greens." In early 2025 he did value studies because his "watercolors always looked faded." That summer he produced about 50 plein air paintings, selected his top four, and had cards printed. The tada list connected "I made some cards" back to the months of color mixing, value studies, and outdoor painting that preceded it.

2. A typed templating language -- He built a parser combinator library called tarsec for TypeScript, then used it to create typestache, a mustache-like template system with static typing. Both were used in personal projects including an Express file-routing tool.

He also notes that "part of the reason I like learning stuff is it lets me do things I couldn't do before," and the list helps him acknowledge that new capability.

Cons

Daily pressure to achieve. "a tada list forces you to have an accomplishment each day so you can write it down," which added stress.

Loss of steam over time. His handwriting visibly deteriorates in later months, and he stopped drawing the header illustrations for the final couple of months.

Conclusion

Bhargava finds value in rediscovering forgotten projects -- like a large watercolor of the Holiday Inn in Pacifica from February that he'd completely forgotten about. He's undecided about repeating the practice, noting he needs to "weigh the accomplishment part against the work it takes to keep it going," but appreciates having the artifact either way.

Additional Context

• The article includes a postscript showing additional color studies, including "another grid of greens."
• He mentions writing posts on security and linear algebra for his Substack, as well as working on a writing app and taking a trip to New York.
• Bhargava is the author of Grokking Algorithms, Second Edition (Manning Publications).
• He acknowledges a lag between drafting Substack posts and publishing, due to technical review and rewrites.