Maison Martin Margiela S/S 2008 Ready-To-Wear Collection
I am pretty fastidious about to-do lists. Obsessive is likely the better word. Most mornings I prepare a list; fresh eyed with notions of super-productivity. As the day progresses I add new tasks as items occur to me. Often it’s random things. Often it’s things that don’t really need to get done.
Get lightbulbs from downstairs, order more dish soap, send a birthday card to XXX, fix the lamp.
I still haven’t fixed the lamp and I never send birthday cards. I claim environmental virtue for the cards.
Rule number one is not to let new to-do items disrupt your productivity plan. So, instead of having them fester in my mind - or worse, forget them - I write them down. My master to-do list just gets longer and longer and longer.
Some weeks the daily lists pile up. Last week was one of those weeks. By Thursday I had about three lists greatly in need of reconciliation. I added the “maybe later” items to my trusty Trello list and then wrote a new to-do list for the day. Which I promptly tore into pieces. Oops.
It was an accident. I now realize it should have been intentional. It was liberating.
In meditation we are taught to put all the loose and distractive ideas from our head into bubbles. We are told to then “pop the bubbles”. Banish those busy thoughts and find peace in our mind. What if we did that with all the things we felt we needed to do? Clean the car, send a thank you note, go vegan, quit sugar, update your linkedin profile, iron anything, make cookies for the office. Yes, there are millions of perfectly valid uses of your time. That doesn't mean you have to allocate your time for those uses.
You are the boss. Well, except when your boss is the boss. (Rule number two is that rule number one is overridden if it’s your boss that adds something to your list.)
Write all those things you feel obligated to do - and aren’t paid to do - on a list. Then tear your list up. Think Dead Poets Society. Robin William’s character Mr Keating instructs his class to rip out the reductive introduction section of their poetry books. Three minutes of Dead Poets Society cinematic gold await you here. “Excrement!” he exclaims, “I don’t hear enough rip!”
Unburden yourself. Write it down and rip it up. Carpe Diem people. Carpe Diem.