Loving and hating to-do lists

My goodness - the break in rhythm with Spring Break has really thrown me for a loop. A commitment to write daily quickly became "daily except at weekends" which quickly became "daily except for when I'm not at work."

Anyway, I've been thinking A LOT about how I choose to spend time on things. During the working day, it's fairly simple: teach my classes, prepare to teach the next class, show up to meetings, do some grading. If there's time left over: run an errand, go to the gym, make a phone call. But when it's time off from work, it is sadly not simple reversal of that, with home-related tasks taking precedence over work.

Miscellaneous work-related tasks still jostle for attention, alongside the grocery store run, enjoyable jobs in the garden, life-sapping jobs in the house, such as paying bills. (Most aggravating task of the life-sapping kind: our bank has terminated how it does automatic bill payments to utility companies so I need to set up each of one of these all over again). So how to put everything in its place?

A to-do list – a list of small achievable tasks – is immensely satisfying.

To-do lists, of course, help dampen down anxiety until they don’t. Recently I’ve started to notice that I am getting really overwhelmed when I think, “If I were to write down everything I needed to get done, I’d need a bunch of sublists. So let’s not write it down.” Or “Perhaps it’s better to do the next task that randomly reveals itself to me because there is no way I can get everything done…” That was me late last week.

Now, back at work, I’m no less busy, but having rather less control of where I am supposed to be when (and exactly what task needs doing within the next hour) has cleared my head of the clutter of an overpacked few days.