I keep a task list, items are crossed off as they are done and the whole list is refreshed weekly. Actually, this is more than just a single list. It has three sections; what was done last week, what I plans to do this week, and what is on hold for a future week. I say ‘what I plan on doing’ rather than ‘what I want to do’ because the items on the list are not always things I want to do. Some are things that have to be done and some are things that should be done but might get pushed off indefinitely if they didn’t appear on a task list. The premise here is that eventually my desire to cross that undesirable item off the list will override my acceptance of just bumping it one more week.
The list started as an outgrowth of a weekly status report I do for work. I figured if my work time is worth planning (with the intent of making it more efficient and accountable), my personal time must also be worth planning. After all, there is less personal time in a workweek and it is precious, so why not make the most of it. At the time, I also was very busy in the evenings and felt I didn’t have any time to do the ‘fun’ stuff, so why not schedule some fun? So the logic went, and that’s where it ended too.
The problem was that the list had become a slave driver. The thought had been rolling around in my head for a while and really crystallized last week when I was walking through the lobby on my way home from work. There was a young lady sitting in the lobby while waiting for her bus. She was reading a book very intently while she waited and seemed to really enjoy it. On that particular day she was smiling and almost giggling, then glancing up to check if her bus had arrived. Noticing other people were around she quickly wiped the smirk off her face, embarrassed or just not wanting anyone to think she was crazy. Regardless, she certainly didn’t seem concerned about her To Do list. I was jealous. We all know that Jealousy is one of the seven deadly sins. What, it’s not? OK, Envy but that’s not important right now. What was important is that my To Do list was supposed to free me from a dreaded Not Getting Anything Done existence (Sloth for you deadly sin trackers). However, in the process it had stealthily swapped my book reading smirks for crawl-space grimaces while doing whatever errand happened to be at the top of The List.
So where did it all go wrong? The idea behind the personal task list was sound; reserve time for the important things and the important things will be done on time. Declare personal stuff important and personal stuff will be done too. Put fun stuff on the list and fun will happen. The idea broke down when the list got bigger than the time available. The fun stuff kept getting pushed to next week. The only thing worse than having your fun-list repeatedly bumped to next week is being constantly reminded by the monotone list-voice, “sorry, fun has been delayed, please try again next week– in the meantime, go fix the grout in the bathroom.”
Crying and complaining over unfinished list-business wasn’t on the list of things to do this week so I’ll switch gears to how I’ve started to fix the list. Step 1 was adding to each item on the list a day for which the item was planned. Step 2 was adding a time allocation. Some items, such as “Update the family budget” could turn into hours and hours of number crunching, so slices were implemented. The task was no longer “Update the budget”, the task was now “Spend a half-hour on budgeting”. Step 3 was doing a reality check by placing the list items in a grid to see if everything could be done. If the tasks didn’t fit (squeezing 8 hours of bill paying, home improvements, exercise, and fun time into 3 hours in evening just wasn’t realistic), tasks had to be shifted around. Step 4 was cutting crap. Things that were just not going to be done but still had merit got moved to the “On Hold” section, things that had no merit were set free from the list. All of these steps were done before the list went to the printer.
That is right, the printer. In this world of blogs, e-mail, PDAs, face-books and twitters (all of which I have), this list goes to the printer. Why? I wrote in a previous post about base lining and re-base lining when a project was hopelessly off track. The list doesn’t get re-base lined. There’s no revising the list mid-week to feel better about the unfinishable business (yes, I know, unfinishable is not a word, but it should be). If an item isn’t done, it isn’t “promoted” to the “finished last week” section. It languishes on the To Do list until guilt goads me into doing it, or surrender scuttles it to the On-Hold section. Re-base lining was about injecting optimism into a project, this approach is more like water-drip torture. Drip, drip, drip- until you scream, “OK, I’ll fix the sink”! After a few weeks of doing this I noticed this gunk appearing all over the list, like calcification on a leaky faucet. Little clingy tasks that at one point seemed like things I should do, but ultimately didn’t get done because they were small, insignificant, and could wait. Every once and a while I’d scrub the list, cleaning out the gunk and symbolically acknowledging that I don’t need all that crap cluttering up the list, and more importantly, my time.
I wish there was a happy ending to add at this point. An ending about a nice shiny list, gunk free and fitting perfectly into the free time of the week. There isn’t, not exactly. The list has been radically de-gunked, but is still too long. About 70% of last weeks list got done, a good number but not what was planned. More fun stuff is getting mixed in, revealing a new problem– there are far too many ways to amuse oneself these days (movies, music, books, pets, games, TV, web surfing). An interesting side-effect of the growing on-hold section has also appeared; sometimes it’s fun to cherry-pick things off that list and, gasp, get them done. Funny how those ignored bastard stepchild tasks can be reborn as delicious alternatives to this weeks planned drudgery.
So instead of the aforementioned happy ending, the list continues to evolve. At the end of a year, I’ll have 52 pages. The top third of each page will show what actually was done in the previous week. Then I can sit down and see what I really want to focus on for the next year. Gradually, this list will tighten into tune like strings on a violin. They screech a bit now, but I’m expecting a much sweeter sound in the future. Gunk free.
