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.