“Love a Monday morning “to-do” list; gets me so pumped up for the week ahead.” — Patricia Bright.
Initially, this quote made me think, “Oh, Sweet baby Jesu in the clouds, switch to decaf, would you?” I realized, however, that there is power in a to-do list, just not first thing on a Monday morning.
‘Tis the season, though, for making lists and checking them twice, and honestly, I do love a good list. There are apps, and I’ve tried them all, but what works best for me are the sticky notes plastered all over my house. They are bright colors and hang off every door jamb and light switch in my home.
The only ones more effective are the ones I write in lipstick on the bathroom mirror. My rule for those is that I cannot erase them until the task they’re reminding me to do is complete. Nothing is a better motivator than big block letters that say, “Don’t forget to buy batteries” in Think Pink from Ulta.
Making a list, especially handwritten, on an actual piece of paper just works for me. It’s one of the few old-school habits I have. I have a stash of favorite notebooks, some of them small, leather ones with little pages, others with funny sayings on the cover. Right now, the one I seem to use most has a front cover that says, “Plans for World Domination,” but so far, it only contains a grocery list and some suggestions for naming a friend’s new puppy, so fear not, I won’t be taking over quite yet.
Crossing something off the list can sometimes make me feel like Rocky when he hits that top step at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Yes, I know, doing a load of laundry, sweeping a floor, writing questions for an interview, and taking out the trash is hardly the same thing as dragging my butt up seventy-two steps. I’ve been to those steps several times, but I’ve never gone all the way up. However, that task is on my “bucket” list because if I try to run to the top, I will be kicking the bucket halfway through.
There are a few secrets to successfully managing a list, though. First, anything on it has to be specific. There is no way I’m putting something like “Clean the house” on one of my lists. It won’t happen. Not because I don’t clean my house—I manage to keep it relatively picked up—but my definition of that varies. There are some days when “clean the house” means “flush the toilet, and wipe up that suspicious puddle on the kitchen floor,” and some days when it means “Order pizza; all the dishes are dirty anyway, what’s the point?”
Second, a list has to be relevant and timely. Suppose it’s something that will take more than a few hours of effort, like owning a Louis Vuitton bag (Santa, take note). That isn’t a task so much as a goal. That’s a whole other category that I still need to figure out completely, and yes, there is a dedicated notebook for that list. There are weeks, however, when I have the attention span of a squirrel on Red Bull, so the life goals have to take a back seat to what needs doing in the short term, like dishes, errands, and remembering to check the mail.
Finally, there are a few list hacks that are game changers. If something occurs to you that you have to do, do it, and then add it to your list just so you can check it off. That’s absolutely not cheating—it’s not like there’s some rules committee that’s going to throw a yellow card at you. Take a win where you can. Another way to make the list a little more fun is to put a few tasks you do anyway without needing a reminder. You brush your teeth every day, right? Put it on the list; it’s a gimme, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
We’ve all got lists at this time of year, and we’re checking them way more than twice, right? It helps me to look at some of the lists I’ve finished to show me that, most of the time, I can do what I set out to do. Looking back at one particularly challenging day, one of the tasks on my list was “Don’t punch anyone else today,” and it was crossed off. I’ve forgotten the details around that, but it got done. Crack on, friends. We’re almost into a new year, and there will be more lists to come, but we got this.
Brenda Kelley Kim has lived in Marblehead for 50 years, and is an author, freelance writer, and mother of three. Her column appears weekly.