We're talking about the emotions related to the specific format of ticking off tasks in a to-do list. Some people in this thread say they feel a palpable relief, even joy. I feel the opposite. I don't suppose anybody feels so strongly about breathing (except maybe some yogi?).

For me, it's about the uniformity of the checkbox experience. It reduces any achiement to "just another brick in the wall". Apparently for others, the same uniformity turns the tasks into something more like a game.

At the end of a day, I like to go back and look at artifacts that resulted from my efforts. Maybe I wrote something, or drew some sketches, or at least had a productive conversation in digital format. Re-reading those outputs feels meaningful in a way that looking at ticked boxes doesn't.

(In my day job I work on video meeting recording systems, among other things. One of the projects that I currently find very motivating is to produce better artifacts from meetings, e.g. automatically created video summaries with context-relevant graphics. Maybe my own love of reviewing work artifacts is why this feels so relevant, and somebody else will find them meaningless because the act of ticking a box — "Discussed X with N" — provided the same satisfaction.)

You don't have to think about breathing.

Many people consider the day-to-day grind of a job as being akin to death; for OP and similar people, these daily tasks are the same thing