To Do Lists

I have just been listening to an amusing and entertaining BBC Radio 3 programme about To Do lists (available here, until next Saturday) and now find myself musing about the whole subject of To Do lists. I have found over the years that while theoretically I am very much in favour of the idea of To Do lists, however, I find that in real life I can never keep one of the damn things going for more than a few days. I cannot make my mind up if that is because I lack in self-discipline or whether I just have difficulty finding an efficient way of managing them once created. I work on the principle that there is no value in including those things I have to do every day (get up, meditate, feed the cats, do my morning inhaler, see what e-mails have arrived overnight, have breakfast, wash, get dressed and so on and so forth as the day progresses) as I just do them all by habit. If it is something I definitely know has to be done within the next day or two or life will become difficult (i.e. remembering to wash clothes, etc) I just find myself remembering it and doing on a relevant day. Everything else, which may or may not need doing just pops up in my mind and I just get on with it when it seems appropriate to do so. I have tried to keep a To Do list of such things and I find that after a couple of days it just gets buried and forgotten and when I finally look at it, some months ago it is either completely out of date or I can see that I managed to do everything essential on the page. Then there is the point that if the list is on paper it gets very untidy when a few items have been crossed out but the rest remain there, still to be done and rewriting the list just takes valuable time when I could have been doing something on my To Do list. When I was commuting to work every day I had my PDA (a Palm), an absolutely invaluable piece of equipment which enabled me to download and to read my e-mails while on the train, to read e-books and also various other facilities, including a To Do list. I tried using that electronic To Do list many times but rarely remembered even to open it daily and to check what was to be done (work things were, of course, on my work computer where I could see them and remember them). Now I have retired I find that I rarely even look at my PDA – everything is either on my p.c. or somewhere in the house.

I do have a list of things I’d like to do sometime in the future. These include: start sewing again, learn Italian, finish some of the many knitting projects half done and unfinished buried in a cupboard, find some volunteer work to do, etc, etc….. Perhaps I should start a special To Do list, just for these.