Writing a to-do list seems like a tidy little way to keep track of what you need to accomplish, but it can fall short or even derail your success. To-do lists don’t provide context about the tasks, they don’t give you a timeline, and they’re easy to ignore. What’s more, to-do list prioritizing systems can be complicated and hard to navigate.

So should you ditch your to-do list completely? Absolutely not, says Paula Rizzo, author of Listful Thinking: Using Lists to be More Productive, Highly Successful and Less Stressed.

“Lists can change your life if you use them correctly,” says Rizzo, founder of ListProducer.com, a website that offers tips and courses for making lists. “It seems so simple to write a list but there’s actually a right way and wrong way to do it if you want to be successful. Oftentimes our bad list-making habits are holding us back.”

The content of your list is key to its usefulness. Here are six items that you should remove or never put on a to-do list:

The first set of items to cross off of your to-do list are the things you do every workday, such as checking your email or attending a daily morning meeting, says Ari Banayan, cofounder of the personal development blog Habit Nest.

“The point is to remove anything from your list that you’ll get done regardless of whether it’s there or not,” he says.

If a task keeps reappearing because you keep putting it off, chances are you’re never going to do it, and that’s OK, says Rizzo.