Pre-departure rush

It’s not such a very long list, really. Finish editing an article, send off a couple of emails, make a casserole, enter receipts from the past ten days into the online checkbook, throw a load of laundry into the washing machine, and empty the dishwasher. All really quite manageable and not very complicated at all.

Except that my plan was to be in bed over an hour ago.

But vacation eves are always like this, or have been for as long as I can remember. I always have far too long a To Do list the night before going away. Partly this is because I procrastinate, and partly it’s because I’m unrealistic about what I can accomplish, and partly it’s because I always have an elusive fantasy of leaving the house perfectly clean and tidy when we go away.

So it’s always a little bit stressful, and one thing I can rely on is getting to bed later than I intend to, usually by hours.

In a way, it’s the worst part of going away on vacation: the last 24-hour rush to get out the door. But within me lies a small suspicion that this is maybe not only the worst part but also the best part. Because unlike other times of the year when my To Do list itself seems to extend out the door, when I’m getting ready to go off on a trip, there’s more excitement than despair underlying the line-up of tasks. Yes, it’s a lot to do, but it’s not just the usual cycle of housework and deadlines that, once done, will only need to be started again. This surge of tasks comes with a deadline and a reward: finish up and you get to leave!

So as much as I may sigh and gripe over all there is to do before I can comfortably close my suitcase and hit the road, I’m not sure I’d trade it for a serene, well-planned pre-departure countdown. Part of the fun of leaving is that sprint to get out.

Because, of course, once it’s finally done, we’ll be gone and headed somewhere else: Washington, D.C. in this case, for a four-day visit with family. Yes, there’s a lot to do, but the prize comes in getting through it and then leaving it all behind. Working hard tonight to meet deadlines and tidy up and wash clothes means not having to do any of that while I’m away.

So I’ll do my best to get it all done and I’ll try to not to stay up too late in doing so. Getting ready to leave can be stressful, but it’s also thrilling: the very same combination that marks every departure, to varying degrees. I’ll finish packing, finalize that article, and pop the laundry into the dryer. Then to bed. After printing out driving directions and watering the plants.

Okay, maybe not so soon to bed after all. It’s hard to get ready for vacation. But it’s almost always worth the crunch time that comes before departure. And I’m not sure I’d want it any other way.

The oldest task on my To Do list

The oldest item on my Google calendar Tasks List is 367 days old.

I’m happy to say that this is the exception, not the rule. In general, I take my To Do list pretty seriously. That’s not to say I get to every item the very same day I list it, but usually I do it within forty-eight hours or so. And if I haven’t crossed it off within a couple of days, I rethink whether it even belongs there.

A good two decades into adulthood, I’ve come to realize that To Do lists should function not as lists of wishes, aspirations or goals, but as lists of tasks – whether work assignments, household chores or errands – that really and truly must get done. Therefore, if I start to run more than a day or two late on any particular To Do item, I instead question just how high a priority it is, whether I really plan to do it at all, if it’s equally essential as the items on the list that I am getting to, and whether there’s perhaps a better time to try to get to it. And then, most of the time, it gets reassigned to a future date.

But the item that I listed on October 25 of 2011 was one I just couldn’t bear to let go of, even as I also apparently couldn’t motivate myself to do it, a full year later. Namely, reading the collection of Thoreau writings that I’d bought last fall.

I really wanted to do it. I really intended to do it. But I just couldn’t seem to get to it. And while I seemed unable to get to the reading, I seemed equally unable to treat Henry David Thoreau as dispassionately as I treat the other items on my To Do list, those that I knock off the list or save for another time if they haven’t justified their importance after a couple of days. Poor Thoreau just sat there languishing in the overdue items column as the listing went from days to weeks to months to finally a year overdue.

But now I can finally cross the item off. Oh, I haven’t read the whole collection yet, but I’ve finally started it, a year and two days after first meaning to get to it. That’s because I found a convenient trick. On my birthday earlier this week, my sister sent me the same Thoreau collection as an e-book. And I synced it onto my phone. Which means even if I remain unable to find the time to sit down and give poor Thoreau my undivided attention for hours on end, I can sneak a peek practically any time I want to, just by glancing at my phone screen. While I’m frying pancakes. In line at the post office. Cooling down after my run. On hold with customer support. Waiting for the movie to begin.

Thoreau himself, I suspect, would hate this. He’d despise not only the technology I rely on in general but also the fact that his writings are now making use of that same technology, and the fact that I was so nonchalantly willing to exchange hours of fireside reading for a quick peek at a 2x3 inch screen.

Well, yes, but it’s better than nothing. For 367 days, I’ve made no progress on this one item on my To Do list. Then yesterday I downloaded the text and started reading the introduction. It probably wouldn’t be good enough for Thoreau, but he didn’t have children’s breakfasts to make, commutes to endure, or customer service on-hold queues. The original hard-copy version of the book of Thoreau readings looks pretty as a decorative object on our hall table, but the e-book is actually getting read, at long last. And my To Do list once again has nothing older than two days on it.it.

The kids are back to school -- so where's my productivity?

It’s bothering me that I’m not getting more done.

The days just after the kids go back to school should be full of quiet, uninterrupted work hours. My productivity should soar in the weeks that follow Labor Day.

But of course, school isn’t the only endeavor that gets under way in early September. There are new community projects being launched, new writing assignments to attack, new clients to cultivate, and all the local friends I didn’t see all summer to catch up with.

Plus the house is kind of a mess, post-summer vacation, and I’d love to do a serious fall cleaning.

So I wake up too early in the morning – or in the middle of the night – thinking about all I’m not getting done: thinking about upcoming deadlines and unanswered correspondences.

Yesterday, for example, I seemed to get nothing done at all. There were just too many distractions. I called the plumber to fix a leak, chopped potatoes to make clam chowder for dinner, went for a run, picked up the mail, finished organizing the school library volunteer schedule, researched some information related to our insurance policies, did a phone interview for an upcoming column, and pitched a story.

And all the while I felt frustrated that I wasn’t getting anything done. Not anything I’d lain awake at night thinking about, at least.

But then I realized what I had in fact gotten done: all of the above. It was one of those times that I needed to turn my focus from my To Do list to my Did list. Yes, there were a bunch of items I didn’t get to, but everything I had managed to address surely didn’t count as nothing, did it?

Sometimes I think I need to get more organized and other times I think I just need to be more realistic about what I can do. Everything I accomplished yesterday needed to be done. To my mind, so did a lot of other things that didn’t get done.

But somehow it all works out, and when I get too frazzled, I just remind myself that by some standards, I’m actually keeping up just fine.

 

"To Do" versus "Did"

It’s another one of those days when I have to remind myself to shift my attention to the “Did” list rather than the “To Do” list, and acknowledge that what I did do deserves recognition just as much as what I didn’t do.

That can be hard to put into practice, though. The “To Do” list is such an attention grabber, with its bold headings and flashy colors – at least the ones my imagination superimposes over the items on it. The To Do list jumps up and down and waves its arms in the air. It does cartwheels and performs cheers. It elbows its way to the front of my consciousness.

Meanwhile, the “Did” list sits quietly in a lounge chair with its feet up, laconically watching the To Do list fuss and clamor.

And so the Did list gets ignored while the squeaky wheel of the To Do list gets all of my mental grease. I run through the litany over and over again of what I need to do, what I did not get to this weekend, what’s due in the upcoming week. I vacuumed yesterday, but only half the house (and the easy half, at that). I need to finish working on my Fourth of July article. There are three baskets of clean laundry waiting to be folded. The car needs an oil change this week too, and I should write an email to the mom in charge of the kids’ beach trip for Wednesday.

But, as I remind myself, one is always making choices about how to spend time. As I was ignoring all of the things on my To Do list, I wasn’t doing absolutely nothing. I was spending a Sunday morning with my sister and her 7-year-old, who were visiting from Washington, D.C. I watched my young nephew row around my parents’ backyard pond in a rowboat, and then I watched the same busy child make up obstacle courses at the playground while my sister and I ruminated on the derivations and deviations of friendship.

True, these weren’t on any To Do list. But the vacuuming will still be there tomorrow and so will the work deadlines. My sister and my nephew, on the other hand, flew back to Washington yesterday. By the time they next visit, my nephew may have outgrown his interest in both rowboats and playgrounds. It truly might have been my last opportunity to see him do these things.

So the To Do list outweighs the Did list in flashiness and magnitude as always, but the Did list basks in a sense of gratitude and satisfaction. What I did mattered to me, even if not to my career development or my domestic upkeep. The To Do list will stick around another day; the Did list will fade into memory. Nonetheless, I’m so glad for what I did.

On the horns of a dilemma

My nine-year-old said the words I love to hear perhaps above all others yesterday. “Mom, could you just read outside while I ride my bike around the driveway?”

She likes to do driveway laps, but not without company. So she likes me to sit there and read while she bikes. It’s like being given a job as an ice cream taster: surely too good to be true.

I pulled a lawn chair out of the garage and found my Kindle, but just as I opened to the front page of the Sunday Boston Globe, I realized that the circumstances were ideal for tackling a household task I’d been procrastinating for months, which was digging through the myriad packing boxes in the garage to find the nighttable lamps we’d never unpacked after moving a year ago. It’s one of those things I keep meaning to do, and yet unlike laundry or cooking, it’s never essential. It’s always sort of a second-tier priority. And second-tier priorities never seem to get done.

If I was ever going to search for those lamps, this was the moment.

And yet there on my Kindle was an entire Sunday Boston Globe plus an entire Sunday New York Times to be read, and the circumstances were ideal for that as well.

It was a fairly straightforward dilemma. The benefits of searching for the lamp were obvious – locating something I needed and garnering the additional satisfaction of crossing off a task that had stagnated on my To Do list for months – but the benefits of the newspaper couldn’t be overlooked either: awareness of current events, exposure to informed opinions, overall intellectual stimulation.

I spend a few idle moments contemplating the nuances of this admittedly trivial dilemma. Reading the newspaper, especially the Sunday paper, really does make me a happier and more fulfilled person. I genuinely feel lacking when I go a whole Sunday without reading the paper at all. I worry that I’m missing out on important world developments. I feel hesitant to join in conversations about current events, feeling uninformed.

On the other hand, procrastinating on household tasks takes its own mental and spiritual toll. Though there are surely people who never think about housework and are able to devote all of their discretionary time to intellectual pursuits, I can’t imagine being free of the gnawing voice inside telling me I can’t let the household tasks get away from me; they multiply like bunnies. Dust bunnies, that is.

In the end, I treated the conflicting choices inside my head the same way I treat my own children when they quarrel: I made them take turns. First I read the lead story in the Globe; and then, with a deep breath, I approached the mountain of packing cartons.

I suppose the outcome was inevitable. Household chores always manage to sink their teeth in; you give them an inch, they take a mile. Two hours later, I was still going through boxes – not because I hadn’t found what I was looking for but because one thing leads to another with a job like this, and once I’d located the lamps, I needed to find the lightbulbs, and while looking for the lightbulbs I came across a favorite vase that I wanted to bring into the house, but if I was going to find a place for that vase, I might as well find the one that went with it as well. And so on.

Not until after the kids were in bed six hours later did I get back to the paper. It was nearly ten o’clock and I was only one article into the Sunday Globe. Unless I stayed up ‘til midnight reading, I knew I’d feel just a little bit behind, intellectually, all week.

Still, knowing there was one fewer task on my To Do list was worth something. So it was with a very small and yet unquenchable sense of accomplishment that I finally finished one last article and reached out gratefully to turn off my much-missed bedside lamp.

To Do....or not To Do

I woke up yesterday morning already facing defeat with my To Do list.

I just knew I wouldn’t get through it. I never get through it. And if there was ever a weekend when my odds were good of navigating my entire To Do list, this weekend was it. We had almost nothing on the calendar other than bringing Tim to a school dance on Friday evening and picking him up afterwards, a children’s theater event on Saturday afternoon, and church on Sunday morning. So if you start the clock at 5 p.m. on Friday – the time that I consider the work week over and the time that both kids are home from their afternoon activities – and run it until 10 p.m. on Sunday – the time I try to get to bed – and then subtract eight hours each on Friday night and Saturday night for sleeping, that leaves about 37 hours to fill however we chose.

But by Sunday morning, I knew I wouldn’t get through my list, and as I lay in bed thinking about getting up, I found myself unwittingly cataloging those items most likely to get bumped. I knew I’d get through the basics: running, church, cooking meals, washing dishes, probably a load or two of laundry. But I knew I wouldn’t get to any of the lower-priority tasks, like putting away the props from the play that ended its run two weeks ago, cleaning up Holly’s room (which in terms of the frustration it causes me should be top-priority, but because of the amount of work it constitutes always gets bumped down a notch), and searching through the boxes that we still haven’t unpacked since moving here last spring for the nighttable lamps that I really wish we could start using again.

So I got out of bed and focused on the beginning-of-day items I wanted to get through: writing in my journal, eating breakfast, putting bacon in the oven for when the kids woke up (they sleep late on weekends, which is truly one of the many joys of reaching the tween years). But even as I drove to church, I was still thinking about all that I wanted to get done but probably wouldn’t find time for.

And then at some point I had a change of heart. What if I just catalogued those things that did get done, instead of those that didn’t? What if instead of rebuking myself for never getting those last few boxes unpacked, even eleven months after our move, I celebrated the fact that I was out for a four-mile run before church? What if making the bed mattered more than not getting the laundry done?

Just thinking this way put a more positive spin on the day. And when I got home from church, the sun was shining and the temperature had already reached the low sixties. Holly wanted to go for a bike ride, Tim wanted to play badminton, and my friends Jane and Donna were coming by for a walk at 2:00.

So I mentally threw away the To Do list and just enjoyed the sunshine. Truth be told, by the time dinnertime rolled around, I’d accomplished even less than I expected. I hadn’t even made it to the supermarket, having rationalized that if we had milk, orange juice, and lunch-makings for Monday, it could wait another 24 hours.

And yet I’d gone running, biking, walking and played badminton, as well as collaborated with Tim to set up a ladder and pluck three errant badminton shuttlecocks out of the roof gutter. It was a late-winter day that felt like summer, and I’d spent more than half of it outside. Yes, the laundry went unwashed, the groceries unpurchased, and the nighttable lamps left in their storage boxes for yet another week.

But I’d stopped thinking about it. For the rest of the day, I counted what I did do rather than what I didn’t. And that made me feel as if I’d accomplished plenty.

The lists that define us

Our lists define us, I sometimes suspect. Our task lists; our grocery lists; our address lists; our errand lists; our lists of phone calls to return. Looking at our personal lists is like exploring cultural anthropology. I often think no document would tell more about any segment of society if put into a time capsule than individual To Do lists. Here’s the set of lists currently stored on my electronic organizer:

* Recipe for honey lime glazed chicken (yes, I’m still a vegetarian)

* Grocery list – the boring kind (Market Basket): dog food, sour cream, laundry detergent, grape nuts

* Grocery list – the interesting kind (Whole Foods): Pleasant Morning Buzz coffee beans, that runny expensive cheese I can never remember the name of, large green olives marinated in herbes Provencal, Swiss chard, the corn muffins my kids love for afterschool snacks

* Things to give my sister Sarah when she next visits: her hardcover copy of “The Help,” four dollars, her pick of all the girls size 8 dresses Holly won’t wear

* Dates we went to NARA beach this summer (to monitor whether the season pass was cost-effective): more than ten visits, so it absolutely was

* Websites for places I’d like to stay on vacation

* Restaurants I’d like to try

* Books I want to read

* Books to recommend (for when people ask me for recommendations and I draw a blank)

* People to whom Holly still owes thankyou notes (her birthday is August 3rd)

* Steps to take to prepare the motorboat (which is docked in Maine) for a hurricane

* …and, of course, a list of ideas for blog posts.

Had enough of the To Do list? How about a "Done!" list?

The Zen Habits blog posted an article recently suggesting a novel approach to To Do lists: list just one item. Accordingly enough, it’s called the One Thing System.

I like the way author Leo Babauta explains his process, but the problem with that approach, for me, is that I actually like To Do lists. I feel far more anxious when I don’t have an active To Do list going than when I do, no matter how long it is. Frequently, I sit down at my desk in the morning feeling like I can’t possibly get through all the tasks I have for the day. But then I open my Google calendar and take a look at the Tasks list and it looks much more manageable than I expected. In a way, it relates to what I always say when I talk about journaling: writing down your feelings is important because thoughts move in circles but words move in lines: if you keep it in your head it swirls around endlessly, but if you write it down you progress from point A to point B. The tasks in my head swirl endlessly, but written on a To Do list, they extend straightforwardly from number one to number five, or number ten, or wherever they end. And then it’s just a simple matter of checking them off.

Or not so simple, sometimes. When my To Do list feels daunting even once I see it written down, I have a different trick I employ. Once in a while, I break from writing a To Do list in the morning and instead, at the end of the day, I write a “Done!” list. I itemize everything I did get to, everything I finished, every small goal I reached in the course of the day. Productive? Well, it may not seem so: after all, seeing what I’ve already done won’t overtly help me make progress to those things I still need to do. And yet somehow it helps. It reminds me that even on those days when it seems like I did very little, something, however finite, got done.

I did that yesterday, and as often happens, it was reassuring. First I wrote down the work obligations I’d fulfilled. I interviewed an expert on Margaret Fuller and finished drafting an article about an upcoming Margaret Fuller celebration. I submitted a photographer assignment form to get a photo to go with the story about Margaret. (Yes, it’s hard to take a photo to run with a story about someone who has been dead for 160 years. We decided to go with a picture of an actress who will be playing Margaret Fuller in an upcoming dramatic production.) I reached my daily editing quota.

Then I moved past work to list other Done! items. I noted that I fed the dog and the guinea pig. I ran two miles. I folded a basket of laundry. I made dinner for my family. I delivered a check I owed to a neighbor. I stopped at the bagel shop for some pumpernickels and some sesames. I filled a two-liter bottle with water and brought it up to the attic. (For vague post-9/11 reasons we try to always keep a few full two-liter bottles of water around, and during last week’s water main break affecting communities around Boston, I’d given away our supply to our student minister.) I called a friend to find out what happened at Wednesday night’s School Committee meeting.

It’s all somewhat satisfying until I take yet another step back and acknowledge how many things are on neither list: not my To Do nor my Done. I didn’t read the New York Times, not one single article. I didn’t serve any meals at a soup kitchen. I didn’t send any checks to charity. I didn’t compost. I didn’t write a letter of comfort to a prisoner.

But the Didn’t Do list can be turned on its head to serve other purposes as well. Because it’s only fair, if I list things I didn’t do and didn’t plan to do, that I include a few items on that list that it’s good I didn’t do. I didn’t kill off any pets. I didn’t make any frivolous clothing purchases. I didn’t poison anyone. I didn’t commit slander. And so on.

There are myriad ways that task lists can work for us or against us. Sometimes they’re overwhelming; other times they’re a comfort. If I tried the Zen Habits method and put just one item on my list each day, what would it be? Well, I could always resort to the Hippocratic oath: First do no harm. Suppose day after day, that was the only item on my list. Could I live up to it? Probably not. My children may well end up in psychotherapy claiming that the essays, blog entries and in Tim’s case full-length memoir that I wrote about them did plenty of harm. My not-very-impressive environmental habits probably generate more harm than I realize every day. I kill mosquitoes. I forget to water plants.

Still, at the end of the day I can look at all these different lists and reassure myself that overall, I did okay. Not stellar, maybe. But not awful. And tomorrow’s a new day, full of new lists to be made.