For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been possessed with a single thought: Exactly how much stuff should reside on my to-do list? If I had a to-do list, that is. Until a couple of weeks ago, I did not have a to-do list put to paper. What I had is the same as many of us middle-aged married men have, the HoneyDo List. It’s an ethereal mass of effort with not so much a starting point as it is the face of a mountain laden with tasks, with the words “YES DEAR” emblazoned on its face in flaming letters. It’s an intimidating image, and as such it left me stymied as to how to attack it.
So I recently decided that there was only one thing for it. I had to sit down and write it all down. I sat down at my Mac, opened the Notes App, set a timer for 30 minutes, and wrote down all the things I thought I needed to OH MY GOD THAT MUCH!?!
I don’t mind telling you that having an ethereal mass of effort is way less terrifying than having an exhaustively detailed list of all the shit you have to do. Thirty-plus items I came up with in that 30 minutes. Since then I’ve added another 10 or so when I see something I hadn’t thought of, and in that time I’ve gone from abject paralysis to abject terror. Not just because of the size of it, but now realizing that I have no idea which one to do first.
After thinking about it for a while, I thought it would be best to try to group these things into sections that make sense, and that made things a little easier. I was able to start things. The good news is that I’ve managed to clear half the list. I have now reached the firstiest of the first-world problems all related to this tangent: Now I’ve cleared all the stuff that requires nothing but time, I have now reached the things that will require learning time or a budget, and if the past is prologue, that’s my next step. Trying to figure out what the priority is, and now I just need to see if the priority is the investment in time, or the investment in money to hire a pro for the stuff that’s outside my ken.
So that’s one exercise in Executive dysfunction resolved. Now, we just need to dedicate time to sitting down and keeping that list refreshed. That reminds me of a technique from one of the mountains of books I’ve read called The Weekly Review. A way of keeping track of what I have done and keeping track of what I need to do in the next week or month or so. I realize that this might seem like a no-brainer to a lot of you, but it really isn’t one to me. The older I get, the more I realize that I need to have alarms and buzzers and notes and things that do everything but explode in front of my face.
And today, I realize that this whole tangent is a lesson that I haven’t done. Or that I have and I let it all go to pot at some point.
So I need to set that shit up again, Don’t I?