I am famous for my lists.
At home, at school, even on the internet.
At times they have bordered on the ridiculous.
But I know my limits.
And I know how to trick myself.
I could have sat home yesterday, pottered my way through the day, played on Facebook and Twitter. But I had Stuff that needed doing.
A whole pile of stuff. Stuff for school, stuff to do around the house, stuff for ballet.
So I made a list. A deliberately LONG list.
My initial list had 34 items on it.
34 is a lot, but on a good day, I can do 30 without too much trouble. I know my limitations.
It wasn’t long before it became apparent that we were out of eggs (item 8 – bake cake) which also necessitated the removal of item 17 from the list (ice cake). Down to 32.
I finished some school work, only to discover I was missing paperwork to complete 3 more items on my list, and suddenly I was down to 29.
And at the end of the day, I had successfully completed 24 of the things on my list. Which is a darn sight more than I would have had there been no list at all.
Lists have several benefits:
- Brain Dump – getting everything out of your head and onto a bit of paper, freeing your brain up to do some actual thinking
- Tricks – Today I tricked myself into doing 24 things I needed to do. Without a list I maybe would have done 6 of them. The motivation to be able to tick things off and get one step closer to my goal made me get up off my backside and get things done
- Clarity – when the going got tough, I could see there were things I could delegate to children. A bit of warning (Mummy’s working through a list, and she’s going to ask for you help for a few things through the day) and they were more than happy to help out, especially as they knew it wasn’t going to take long.
I can take the 10 things that didn’t make it today, and add them to future lists. Clearly they weren’t the deadline type items, or I would be more concerned right now. I had planned to bake a cake in preparation for visitors today, so perhaps I’d better go and do that now.
But first I need to make a list for today.
Comment