Just a silly musing tonight…
I used to be trapped by my To Do list. I would seek out the best pen and paper (yes, I’ve been writing To Do lists since before devices became the norm), sit down with a cup of coffee and carefully put down all the things I wanted to get done.
Unfortunately, I didn’t stop there. My demise came when I chose to put the date on the list. You see, the date indicated my expectation of myself as to when the list SHOULD be complete.
If for some reason I didn’t finish all of the items on the list, it became a perfect excuse to make myself inadequate, lazy, less than, etc.
And then, I’d turn around and put the date on a new piece of paper, move the things not completed to the new list, add everything new I wanted to do and start the cycle all over again.
A simple date on a piece of paper with a list of things I wanted to accomplish, caused me untold misery.
And then it happened. I had a To Do list aha moment! I realized that since I almost never completed the list on the date I noted and that I moved things from one day to the next in addition to adding the new items, the key was a change in my expectations.
So, I stopped putting the date on the list. As simple as it sounds, this changed my feelings about my To Do list and I quit giving myself a hard time about an artificial deadline.
Another thing I do for fun (ok, there might be a little bit of “atta girl” in it, too) is this; if I finish something that wasn’t on my list but was rattling around in my head as something that should have been on the list, I take out my pen, write down the item and then cross it off the list!