I have always had a tendency to bite off more than I can chew. How fitting to begin a new project on Labor Day. But, how typical of me to begin a new project when I am quite drowning in the projects I currently have. At any point in my life I can find a to-do list that is longer than the day is long. At any moment, including right this second, it’s much easier for me to rattle off twenty things I need to get done than to note what I have done.
I come by this tendency honestly. It’s not a character aberration unless I share it with a long line of women who believed not only that a mere mortal woman could do the work of ten in a single day, but also that God Himself had ordained them to do so. Then, if we don’t accomplish everything on our lists, clearly the twin sins of indolence and disorganization must have been to blame.
I can still visualize my mother’s lists. In certain eras she wrote them down on sheets of typing paper –the thin kind used for the carbon copies – folded in half lengthwise. And she saved them. I clearly remember sitting on attic stairs looking through a stack of old lists that waited there with other items that needed to be hauled upstairs to her attic office. (No one thought to help her move those piles of things that waited to be transported up or down at the landings of every one of the four staircases in our house.) I have no memory of what might have been on the lists, though I do remember that they almost all contained an item “letters” with a sublist of people I actually knew or had at least heard about. Every once in a while a name would be crossed out with a line ending in a check-mark. But mostly the list of correspondents carried over from one list to the next.
I suspect, however, that those lists had the same wild variation and lack of hierarchy that my own lists have, with “write lab materials” right there next to “wash stove.” What’s more important after all, a clean toilet or the Great American Novel?
When my mother died I found massive collections of such lists; the format changing over the years. I threw them all away and am not sorry to have done so. Had I not, they would be sitting in a box somewhere worrying me, being another item on a list. As it is, I have boxes and boxes of family photographs. Someday I will sort through those pictures, put them into fabulous albums individually crafted for each of a long list of people. Oh and perhaps I could write commentary about each picture. You see how my ambitious little mind works to create complicated projects out of just about anything? Perhaps for today I will write the idea down on a list and go wash my stove. Or any of the other hundred items on my list.
I do lists at home and at work. I have a list of things that I must accomplish weekly, and another of things I must accomplish monthly. My list are because I am a scatter brain and forget things that are important. But I use the computer program sticky notes and One Note at work. No use having a list you cannot read. I also believe if the lists are too long they should be broken down. Because completing things is good. It renews us and gives us a since of accomplishment. I do another type of list, that's the piles on my desk, I am working on this, oh now I have to work on that and each successive thing is piled on top of the other, Love your composition here.
i am guilty of thd same thing. i know i have lists, but they're somewhere in this mess called my living room/studio. i'm pretty sure someone's playing with me, because i know i made a list and i left it here. oh, well, it'll show up sooner or later.
lovely shot, francoise. now time to clean that oven.
I make lists in vain, pretending to be far more organized than I actually am. Many of them find the trash before completion, but I think that's for the best, really. I enjoyed hearing about your memory of your mother's lists. It is the little things.
I am also completely confused as to why I wasn't following you. I sincerely thought I had already clicked the follow button long-ago, yet it appears I did not.
I too, hoard the lists of unfinished guilt more than the sense of accomplishment, although flylady.com has helped a lot by telling me its ok to jump in where I am, and to do at least one thing I've been procrastinating about every wednesday. Nice writing here. Better than a long list - now we need a Tah-Done list
lovely shot, francoise. now time to clean that oven.