Sometimes to-do lists can be overwhelming, right? Right. (The terror of to-do lists is a subject for another blog—and in fact, what I cover in my upcoming book, The Overwhelmed Overachiever).
But it hit me this week that to-do lists, when properly fed and managed, can be helpful planning tools. When things are calm, when life is fair weathered and the sailing smooth. When one hour trips merrily into the next, and you're making the headway you'd planned to make with the wind behind your sails.
Here, I'm going to show you what my techniques are for when life is smooth sailing. Because I think it's easier to start practicing time management techniques when you're not clinging to the hull of an upturned sailboat in a hurricane.
First, under normal operating conditions, I put all my to-dos on my calendar. I like to attach them to a date and a time. If I'm not sure when I will get to them, I try to pick a date and time in the future that seems a likely match (mow the lawn? definitely a weekend activity).
If I want some screen-free time, I'll identify my items for the day (I try to choose three to five at most, though some days have more) and put those on a post-it note. Here's one from this weekend, when I didn't want to do computer work or look at my iCal:
This list clearly has more than three to five items, as you can see.
At the end of the day, as I admired the list and how many things I'd gotten done, I wondered why today was easy and so productive, when other days I'm exhausted and barely anything gets done. In part it's because my seasonal allergies are finally chilling and not making me as tired. But the big thing, really, was that I'm in a good moment of having things mostly chugging along without feeling like I'm about to drown.
The other big reason was that I just did a decent job at all of these. I didn't do them perfectly. I didn't do them super thoroughly. I did an OK job—as I heard someone say once, "Good enough to move on." I weeded and mulched a big section of the backyard planting beds and then felt like I'd done enough. I trimmed the yews lightly with a pair of hand clippers and let most of the clippings fall on the ground. I only picked up a few big clumps and put them in the yard bin. The rest will decay and fall apart, or I'll pick them up later if I feel like it. I hit the overgrown front yard bush as I was taking the yard bin to the road. I just trimmed off the biggest overgrown pieces with hand clippers and didn't worry about getting out the hedge trimmers and smoothing everything perfectly. I don't have the time for perfection. If I want this list done, I need to do everything well enough, not perfectly.
I also did a couple of other things not on the list, like watering my outdoor container plants. And yes, even the post-it is "good enough," because I accidentally soaked the notepad when I was watering one of those plants. But hey, I shook it off and let it dry overnight, and now the pad, while no longer pristine and perfect, is perfectly good enough to keep using.
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