my to do list fell on an elephant. the elephant died.
In my twenties I thought I was so busy. Oh my look at me, I would moan, I am so busy. See how I had to carry my two bags of groceries home from the grocery store and cook a pot of mac and cheese for just little old me and eat it while watching TV without interruption? Oh, how weary am I? These are difficult times.
That was then, this is mayhem. Life gets busier and busier and while I don’t long for the mac and cheese alone on the sofa days I laugh at how stupid I was. I did not appreciate my free time. I did not know what my future held. I can now spend my entire day busy as a bee and go to bed with a thousand things left to do.
The question is always time management and the answer is not obvious. So many things factor into deciding which items on your list will get priority attention. Do you start at the top and go until you can go no more? Do you stab at it willy nilly and hope for the best? Is it better to do the things you like first or the other way around? Do you pour a cup of coffee, grab a magazine, pretend the list doesn’t exist and sit on the deck all day reading silly articles about the comeback of the pantsuit?
According to this theory, what I actually need is for time to not exist. It would be great if everything could happen all at once. Imagine all the free time I’d – oh, oops. That doesn’t work either.
Time management is an excellent catch phrase and if practiced can be effective in, you guessed it, managing your time. Say you’ve got a bunch of things to do and you go at them with a carefree devil-may-care attitude. The results are predictable. You’ll get some stuff done but go to bed feeling like you just didn’t quite get there. But if you figure out a way to manage your time effectively you’re going to have better success. Which is great. You’ll get 7 of 10 items checked off of your list as opposed to three. Marvelous. Sleep well.
The point, I think, is that even if you do your best – manage your time well, be organized and purpose driven – chances are you’re never going to get everything done. Especially if you are a woman. Especially if you are a woman with children. To Do Lists are on an infinity loop. Ninety percent of everything on them doesn’t go away once you’ve done it. It all shows up again the next day. The sun always rises, the dog must always go out to pee and I think it’s still a law that if you drop your children off at school you have to go back and get them. That’s not a one of.
I make light of this never-ending, heavy enough to kill an elephant To Do List phenomenon and yet I realize it is no laughing matter. More and more of us feel tugged too far in too many directions and stress levels are at an all time high. Anxiety, depression and general malaise are taking their toll and our busy lives are often to blame. Between all of our have-to’s and would-like-to’s grown ups today are run ragged.
What can we do about it? It’s all well and good to see the problem, moan about the problem, throw the problem at the wall and see if it bleeds. But what can we do about it? Let’s brainstorm.
carry on, business as usual
Lookit, we’re grown ups and we’ve got stuff to do. Quit whining. Drink a lot to compensate.
shorten the list
Pull the kids out of dance/hockey/swimming/acting classes, eat off of paper plates and teach the baby how to use the vacuum. Tell everyone smelling bad is the new smelling good so that you don’t ever have to do laundry again.
throw the list away
This sounds like a great idea but ends up looking like an episode of Hoarders had a baby with an episode of CSI and all the people are dead.
prioritize and cut yourself some slack
Let’s be honest. Stress kills and To Do Lists never ever end. You could sell your car so that you never have to wash it again but you’ll just buy another one because the subway is smelly.
Instead, the answer might be to decide what things need doing first and why. Some things can’t wait but maybe the carpet in the basement can suffer under the weight of dog hair and puzzle pieces for one more day so that you can use your time for more enjoyable things like planning a vacation or watching a couple episodes of Grey’s Anatomy in your jammies while eating puffed wheat cake.
Prioritize and then – this is the important bit – forget it. Do your best and go to bed feeling good about that. Your To Do List won’t go away until you do so get over it. Don’t To Do List yourself into an early grave, it’s not worth it. Breath in, breath out, and flow with rather than against the never ending nature of To Do Lists. Nothing you can do about it, why worry?
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“That was then, this is mayhem” would be a most excellent book title!
ha, yes it would.