Here’s a new thing I’ve been doing. Every morning while I’m eating breakfast at the kitchen table I pull out my notebook and write down ten things to do that day.
These things don’t necessarily need to be high priority items. They are simply things I hope to accomplish that day. They range from super important (work on client projects), to super mundane (do laundry), to things I habitually do every day (practice dancing).
As I proceed through the day I cross out each item as I do them.
Here is my list for today:
There is no one particular reason I started doing this. It’s more of hodge-podge of reasons.
- Focuses my brain and helps me be more intentional with my time
- I like making lists and I like crossing things off. It is fun.
- Helps me feel less overwhelmed with all the things I’m “supposed to be doing”
- Gives me small feelings of accomplishment throughout the day whenever I complete an item and cross it off. It feels good to do stuff even if it’s small stuff.
- Helps reinforce the idea that there will ALWAYS be more and more stuff to do, more stuff than I could possibly have time for (I rarely complete all 10 things on the list).
- If I ever come to a point in the day where I can’t decide what do, I consult the list and it will tell me
One of the things I’m working on right now is spending less time thinking about doing stuff and more time actually doing the stuff.
Less thinking and more doing. It’s the “not doing of stuff” that is at the root of most of my anxiety. When I feel awful about my situation, it’s almost always because I’m not doing anything.
The list helps in ways I don’t fully understand. The power of the list is voodoo magic as far as I’m concerned.
For example, I’ve been thinking about returning some Amazon purchases for months. I would think about this at least once a day but never bothered to do anything about it. It was slowly driving me insane. However, the other day I added “return amazon returns” on the list. The next thing you know I was in my car driving to the Whole Foods to return a bunch stupid Amazon crap I didn’t want.
Why didn’t I do it earlier? I have no idea! It wasn’t even hard and only took about 30 minutes total. I got to say, it felt really good to cross that one off. The list is fucking magic!
Here is today’s list again. I’ve already crossed a few things off.
