Here’s the thing with making lists: they put things into perspective, set milestones, and then, when time keeps rolling on without you getting any closer to your destinations, you know exactly how far you’ve failed.
That, for the record, is the ultimate doom and gloom perspective on to-do lists. And, as someone with 3 bouncing around (I’m including the unwritten one in my head of things that I haven’t written down yet), I am an amateur expert in the field of how much a to-do list can screw with your head. For example, if you look at how I am staking up against my current 2012 resolution list-in-perpetual-revision:
| Item | Status |
|---|---|
| One blog post a week | Missed one due to technical difficulties! |
| One new recipe a month | Red Velvet Cake from scratch |
| Gym 3x a week | Success! |
| Eat vitamins/be nutritionally sufficient | Vitamins are a go, my body isn’t so sure on point 2, and, for the life of me, I can’t figure out what it is. But this isn’t a discussing health problems post, just a status check. Suffice it to say that I’m not supposed to be so nutritionally sufficient that I’m hosting 3rd party organisms. |
| Figure out my relationship to social media | I’ve started saying “only important” to people in my Facebook newsfeed and only checking in 3-4 times a week, which I find to be very liberating. |
| Make sure the relationships in your life are meaningful | This needs a sub-list! |
Okay, it’s not that bad. Isn’t it nifty when things you say (like to-do lists help give perspective), are actually true?
It just feels like the end of the month appears out of nowhere and, instinctively, I flinch because I’M NOT READY YET, THERE WAS STILL ALL THIS STUFF TO DO AND, AND, AHHHHHHHH.
But then, after you’ve scared the neighbors with your awkward high-pitched distress sounds, you take a deep breath and look at your calendar and realize, oh yeah, I did do stuff!
Maybe it wasn’t necessarily “the plan,” but the plan didn’t take into account being invited to go skiing in the Catskills which put me in the perfect place to meet up with an old friend. We’ll gloss over the detail of my being 2.5 hours late due to dinner taking longer than expected and Hunter Mountain being very far north. So I was really, really tired, didn’t get to write or clean my room properly for another week, but I got to go back on the slopes after a multi-year hiatus (because last year’s cross-country adventure doesn’t count, unless you think the elliptical is a good approximation of downhill skiing, in which case you need to reconsider your approach to the sport) and I got to deepen some of my relationships. I had to let one resolution lapse so another could advance.
And I’m starting to think that’s the key to resolutions and to-do lists: not all items are equal in value and sometimes it’s like chess, where you sacrifice a pawn to ultimately win the game. Maybe the milestones aren’t linear, and you’ll only hit some. Maybe that’s considered failure, or maybe I need to add “be more flexible with lists” to my to-do list.
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