Estates

I'm used to looking at old Wills. I particularly like the ones where all the person's possessions are listed on one page. They lived before shopping centers. Property lines were written as extending to so-and-so's fence line. No GPS. 

I don't know this for a fact but I'm guessing the reason people wrote their Wills on one page was because all their worldly possession could fit on one page. 

This is not exactly relevant to filing historical documents but it's interesting to note the difference between past and present. I only mention this because a cousin is presently dealing with her mother's estate where she listed all her worldly possessions as a codicil to her Will. In other words, a binding legal document. 

Oh.My.GOD.

And, of course, the lawyers won't let it go. And she's been up til 1 o'clock multiple mornings creating a spreadsheet for them. 

There's a big difference between a compact listing of 1 pitchfork, 1 basket, 1 horse, 1 cow and calf, 1 plough, potatoes in the field, 1 iron kettle, 1 bed and bed clothing, 2 slaves ... and 6,000 items from your favourite mall and London Drugs. 

As far as I could tell from listening to this on the phone there are 3 items of enduring value; two paintings and a wedding ring. This is happening in British Columbia so there are other categories for probate; furniture, clothing, and electronics at Fair Market Value.

I'm not a legal scholar so I work from common sense if I can. 

I wrote a Will a long time ago. I haven't changed it since. It covers where my money goes. Full stop. 

And then there's my household full of 21st century possessions, just the regular stuff everyone has; linens, clothes, kitchen utensils, ubiquitous plastic. This is not part of my Will. Because some of it changes. I break things. I send things to recycling. I don't need the trouble of writing a new Will every time I go shopping. 

I don't have a single thing that would increase in market value over time; jewellery, rare manuscripts, antiques, coin or stamp collections. What I have for my Executor is a list. I wrote it as a map in case he was looking for something in particular. To save him the bother of having to look everywhere.

After listening to my cousin and doing a little research on probate I went through my house on a test run of furniture, clothing and electronics imagining I was pricing out a yard sale and it took five minutes.  

I have another document that says where I want particular items sent to. Not much but a few things of possible value to others. Like genealogy files on external hard-drives and a 70-year old sewing machine that still runs and still repairs my clothes and a few paper files (too many actually). 

What I'm saying is if you don't need to complicate your life with a codicil listing of everything in your bathroom cabinet, don't. 

Yet Another To-Do List, Plan B

 Obviously I'm not solving the world's big problems here.

I love index cards. I love them so much I almost purchased multi-colored ones. After working this system for awhile, I managed to get half my projects finished. So it did give me the focus I was looking for. Then I was distracted by a couple of unexpected events and when I came back to my bulletin board it was covered with other paper and I was deep into creating my 2026 gardening calendar and I lost track of where I was with the index cards. 

My 3 x 4 foot magnetic bulletin board isn't big enough. I need a bulletin WALL. 

I've thought about getting a smartphone so I can have my external brain with me every second of the day but there's two issues with that. First, my eyes can't manage a screen that small. Two, it's overkill for my lifestyle. I'm not driving and flying all over the place. I don't need to be reading text messages while simultaneously navigating a sidewalk banging myself into light standards. I don't need to be instantly accessible to everyone in the world. Or vice versa. It's on a par with opening a Facebook account. I keep thinking about it but in 20 years I still haven't done it. 

I read that successful people don't keep to-do lists. They put everything on their calendar. This could well be true. Something I have noticed over time is that everything on my calendar gets done. Some of what I put on paper gets done but paper tends to wander at my house. 

I had to seriously look at the insanity of keeping a notebook and pen in every corner where I might have an interesting thought. I'm not saying this is not an interesting method, actually it's quite chaotic but, since most of my clothes don't have pockets, one fix would be to wear a belly-bag 24/7 and have one (small) notebook and one pen.

I've tried paper calendars. A day planner is too big for me to carry around, even from one room to another. A smaller calendar is too small. I've tried printing calendars, one month per page. I've tried posting them to my bulletin board. I've tried keeping them in a 3-ring binder. They all require that I'm tethered to a pencil and eraser.

I have an E-notebook for thinking out loud and doodling but the calendar function is not sophisticated enough for my taste. Even if it was I'd be constantly wondering which room I left it in. 

I don't keep files in The Cloud. I don't need to sync between devices. I don't even keep the WiFi turned on at home. 

So, my single calendar is on my desktop computer. Yes, some of us old dinosaurs still use desktops. 

Since I use the desktop to check my email it makes sense to have my calendar in the same place. 

I tried the calendar method some years ago but never got it quite finessed. I'm trying again. Anything recurring daily or weekly doesn't sit well on a calendar because it clutters up the place. The fix I found for this is to put an asterisk before a recurring item and drag and drop it to its next date instead of having it already there multiple times. As with the index cards, I only put one item per day to be worked on for a limited amount of time, an hour say. 

The other thing is to categorize those items with a color; small color bar in the case of Thunderbird calendar, maybe a colored font in others. This helps to know where the end of the line is when dragging items forward. Creating multiple calendars in different colors, although it looks nice, is actually not a good choice as each calendar has to be backed up separately. If you're trying to simplify your life, multi-colored calendars is a digital rabbit hole too far.

All this to say, it doesn't matter what or where your calendar is, if to-do lists make you crazy, try your calendar. It's a more authoritative voice. The calendar says, Here in this box is what you need to get done today. A to-do list says, Here's the stuff you should do but if you don't it will still be here tomorrow and too often it is. 

Yet Another To-Do List

Anyone who's been reading me for the past 20 years or so knows that I have a thing about organization and time management. It doesn't mean I'm good at it which I should be by now. It just means I've spent a lot of time at it. 

I've cycled through a lot of ideas. And a lot of computer to-do lists. And computer software. And methods for prioritizing. More than I can remember. Then I fell in love with paper again, different kinds of paper, colours and patterns of paper and notebooks and then I didn't look at it, or looked at it so much I didn't see it any more. 

And then AI arrived and for only $20/mth a robot is supposed to be smarter (read, less complicated) than I am. When I heard the advertiser say, "All I have to do is "brain dump" and prioritize", the word 'prioritize' had me running for the hills.  

I tried that one on paper. I folded a piece of paper into 4 and labelled it High, Medium, Low, Very Low and did a quick sort of my projects. And guess what? I immediately launched into spending all day working on the lowest priority item on the list. And then I sat back and mused on the psychology of that.

Prioritizing has a mind-boggling array of meanings and no two people in the world think it means the same thing. Except in extreme cases where a threat to life is imminent and a common survival instinct kicks in. 

Everything on my list is important to me for some reason. More or less important to me depending on the day and my mood. Unless I want to go down the rabbit hole of constantly analyzing and prioritizing and re-prioritizing my reasons ... should, could, want to, would be fun ... everything on my list is of equal status. 

So the question becomes, How to handle a list where everything's equal and everything gets some air-time?

This is what it's come to; my passion for index cards in my face where I can see them. It doesn't have to be vertical. It doesn't have to be index cards. It's just what I have.

 

 

Some of my things were on one list or another for years. And I wondered why I didn't get around to them. The reason is easy. I kept de-prioritizing them even though I thought I shouldn't. Why did I do that? I don't know. Maybe a therapist could tell me.

 

Why this system works so well for me is that a to-do list throws me into a chasm of overwhelm, anxiety and indecision. With index cards I only have to look at one at a time. 

These are not things I do daily by rote, or my calendar that's time-sensitive; a world unto itself. It's not a shopping list. These are projects that require varying lengths of time so some will finish. Some will never finish. Other items will be added. It's very open-ended that way.

 

This game is loosely based on a 30-minute timer. Or an hour or so depending on the project. That gives some focus to things I'd rarely get around to otherwise, like house-cleaning. And it puts a container around things that I can get lost in for weeks on end, like FamilySearch. It also makes me confront items that I don't see myself ever doing and it's time to face the facts. But ... I can still change my mind and add them back. 

The only rule of this game is that once the time has passed for an item I turn its card over and I don't visit it again until all the cards have been turned over and I'm starting anew. That means even the things I love to procrastinate on, but really need to be done, get some time to be pushed forward and my life stays in better balance. Pretty simple.

 

So far, so good.