Waiting for, the list nobody keeps

2026-08-16

The cheapest list in any productivity system is the one almost nobody maintains, and it is the one that makes you look organised to everybody else.

Think of the last three things you are owed. Somebody was going to send a contract, a quote, an answer. You know roughly who and roughly when, and if one of them never arrives you will find out in a fortnight, from the consequence.

Every method has a name for the list that fixes this. GTD calls it Waiting For. Almost nobody keeps it, and the reason is that the pay-off arrives later than the effort, which is the shape of every good habit and every abandoned one.

Three fields, and only three

The waiting-for template in Pando: who-owes-what placeholder lines with asked-and-chased dates in the notes, a grey insurer example after two chases, and an agent prompt that reports what went quiet

The list stays alive only if adding to it costs one line:

who owes it,
what it is,
when you asked, and the dates you chased.

That is all. The moment it asks for a status field or a priority, it becomes a form, and forms are the reason the list dies.

The dates in the note are what make the list useful in an argument. "Asked 02 Aug, chased 09 and 16 Aug" is a fact. "I think I asked a while ago" is a feeling, and it loses.

Where the list belongs

Under the project it came from, not in a separate app. Two reasons.

You add to it at the exact moment you finish an email, which is when the project is already on screen. A separate app means switching, and switching means you will do it later, which means never.

And when the project ends, its outstanding items end with it. A global Waiting-For list keeps growing forever because nothing ever tells it to forget.

What to do on Friday

The whole ritual is two minutes at the weekly review: read the list, and for anything older than a week, chase it and note the date. Nothing else.

The effect is out of proportion to the effort. You stop being the person who forgets what they were promised, and you become the person who chases politely on the seventh day. Other people notice that long before they notice anything else about your system.

The half an agent can do

An agent reading the branch can do the boring half: point out what has gone quiet ("three items over a week, one over a fortnight"), and draft the chasing message with the dates already in it. What it must not do is chase on your behalf, because tone with a person you know is not a thing to delegate.

Take the list

Open the template, press "Show in my Pando", and put the three things you are owed into it right now, with the dates you asked. If you cannot remember the dates, that is the finding.