On the Proper Use of a To-Do List

I'm an American, and that means a lot of things to me. It means I believe in freedom and justice and all that rot. It means I'm not keen on having someone tell me what I can and can't say or do so long as I'm not hurting anyone else. It means I occasionally crave a cheeseburger roughly the size of my head, which is odd because I'm a vegetarian. Also, it means that given the choice between sitting on my duff and nearly anything else, I will choose the former. This is not to say we're lazy, but rather is indicative of passion for our hobbies, in my case reading and playing video games.

As such, I take a certain view on the to-do list, a view that I think is shared by most people. I see the list as the things I have to get done before I can move on to things that I'd rather be doing. You do the things on the list, you check them off, and then you chill. Very straight forward.

So this weekend I faced what I believed to be such a list. As a result of becoming a homeowner, these lists have been ponderous lately, and it's not uncommon for entire weekends to be lost to them. Still, the list management presented this weekend seemed reasonable, well within the realm of things we could get done and still have some quiet time left over in the evening.

So, I tore into the list, trying to get things marked off, each checkmark putting me closer to the all important down time. Unfortunately, something was amiss (which is a strange word considering that one rarely hears an embarrassing story that ends with discovering something is a miss, whereas there are many fine embarrassing stories ending with discovering something is a mister - just ask Eddie Murphy). While working, I noticed that management was also working furiously the entire time, spending hours meticulously toiling over her task. The problem was this: the task was not on the list.

My head was spinning. If we were not working off the list, then why was the list there? What meaning did it have? What would we check off when she finally finished the unnamed unit of work that was being performed? Would it replace something else on the list? Was there another list that I was unaware of?

As we continued to work, I realized that the majority of our time was going to non-list items. Night approached, kids went to bed, and still we carried on. Now don't get me wrong, all of the things we did had to be done, and the place looks a lot better now that we've done them. Still, I was hung up on the whole list thing, as clearly the point of down time had come and gone, and we were approaching the point of "I really wanted to go to bed an hour ago".

So, the next day, as we once again returned to the list, I approached the subject of our straying yesterday, hoping to tighten up the schedule and perhaps find some time on Sunday evening for rest. It turns out that what I had been fretting over was not due to our straying, but rather a misunderstanding of the list itself. It was explained to me that it was not in fact a to-do list at all, but rather a list of things management did not want to forget to do while working through the real to-do list which was stored internally.

Now, this is probably a me thing, but that took a minute to process. The written list that we were checking off was not the real list, but a subset of the real list. The real list was somewhere else, somewhere I wasn't privy to, somewhere I could not check things off, eventually reaching a goal. I didn't realize until then how much I depended on that list. A lot of my inspiration comes from reaching my goals, from checking things off and seeing the progress that results. All of the sudden, I'm faced with a task that, if not insurmountable, was at least undefinable.

This totally sucked the wind out of my sails. All my inspiration was gone, replaced with frustration. See, we didn't quite finish, so now I'm going into the week tired and feeling like I've failed. This morning, when my alarm went off at 5:45, I was already behind. Ugh.

Obviously, this is something I have to get over, but with a caveat. I think it needs to be a matter of public policy that a written list of tasks presented to someone at the beginning of the weekend is either a full to-do list, or clearly labeled otherwise. Oh, and no fine print. It's the list, the whole list, and nothing but the list. That's all my feeble little task-centered mind can handle.