The dreaded To-Do List.  The list where you mark something off and two more things mysteriously appear.  I live and die by the to-do list.  When I was only teaching school, the to-do list was fairly simple – do lesson plans, plan for the play, and the concert, and the music festival, and… you get it.  But now, with the tons of things I’ve gotten myself into, the to-do list has a life of its own, filled with directives for all kinds of areas in my life, never ending and never finished.

I’m a yellow pad and purple/pink pen kind of girl.  I’ve tried doing lists on the computer, but there’s something so much more satisfying in crossing something off my list instead of deleting it.  With deleting something, you never really remember how much you had on the list in the first place.  With the yellow pad, you can look at it at the end of the day or week or month and say, wow, I accomplished (or) didn’t accomplish a LOT.

I would love to say I’m one of those write everything in straight lines, organized people, but what I tend to do is lots of circles and arrows and abbreviations that I tend to forget later and have to figure out what I meant.  It seemed faster when I wrote it down. I do this with note taking as well.  Research now says that people who write things down remember them better.  Maybe.  It works for my grocery lists as once I write it down I can almost remember every item on it without looking.  But somehow the to-do list isn’t that same way.  Maybe because I write it down so I don’t HAVE to remember – I can just check the list.

So how do you know that something is a priority?  Well, you put an asterisk in front of it. If it’s REALLY important, like I need to do it today or I’ll miss an important deadline, I may have multiple asterisks screaming at me to DO THIS NOW.  And I rarely start from the top of the list and go down.  Sometimes I just need to do all of the easy little tasks first so I make myself think I’m doing a lot, hopefully inspiring me to tackle at least one big project.  Or leave me with nothing but long, difficult projects so now I have no choice but to make the time to do it and be completely overwhelmed with life in general.

Don’t get me wrong.  I LOVE doing all the things I’m doing. Individually.  It’s when I’m doing them all at once, which seems like All. The. Time. that it’s a problem.  So I work to compartmentalize and prioritize things (arrow pointing back to the asterisks), which I know makes people crazy when they think I’m not going to get something finished, but I usually get it done before I need to.  I say usually because, well, let’s be honest, I’m not superwoman and occasionally I just stop and realize I can’t do it all.  So I apologize to whoever else is involved, try to make it right and then put it back on the list.

Just so you don’t think that everything on my to-do list is accomplishing stuff for others, I DO have several tasks for me on there too.  And they’ve been there for months because somehow everything else seems to be more important and have an actual deadline.  I was looking at the yellow pad today and realized that some things I want to do for me on the list have been there for a couple of years.  Literally. They just seem to get overlooked or pushed to the bottom of the list.  Not sure what that says about me…. Maybe I’ll put that on the to-do list to think about later.