I remember when my "To Do" list consisted of fairly simple things and would fit on a Post-It note. It was sunny and cute and often had a little smile on it.
Write Lynn
Finish Mack's painting
Stat out gnarly red dragon
^_^
Usually, my endeavors weren't all that manifold. I lived in a pretty predictable loop of work, hobby, and sleep, with regular interjections of exercise, study, and hustle. Predictability and routine were the norm.
Then DOC shut down the medium facility behind the walls, bulldozed my neighborhood, and scattered us all to the four winds. I landed at Airway Heights, where routine became a history lesson.
Walla Walla's pace was a casual stroll; Airway's was a frenetic dash across opposing treadmills. Pause too long, and you were pushed in a different direction. I almost rebelled and turned inward; the culture shock was in the million-volt range.
But thanks to my goofy buddy, John Lipinski, and his insistence I join his fantasy football league (my head said no, but my mouth said yes), I didn't implode and found a new way to cope with a forced social situation.
Fantasy football was fun at first, but there's no internet or on-demand stats you can get ahold of in here to calculate things. Instead, it's an exercise at channel changing, ticker monitoring, newspaper wrangling, and sprints to the library to verify everything in THEIR newspapers.
In short, you get real good at making lists. You might as well track everything going on in your league if you're gonna track anything at all. It helps everyone out and keeps the game fair when everyone pitches in. It also builds new social skills and helps refine old ones.
The next list evolution was born from working in the textiles shop as an assistant to the incredible maintenance guy, Jay Shurgar (sorry if I've misspelled that). Jay was amazing, a veritable encyclopedia of all things mechanical. He kept that shop running so well, we often had little to do but wait for the odd incident to pop up.
And he did it with meticulously curated lists.
After working with Jay, I adopted his method and found it worked just as well with everyday life. Break things down into their smallest components and tackle them one by one. It's the whole "How do you eat an elephant?" analogy... One bite at a time.
However, that level of detail gets taxing, and elephant hide is tough. My lists slowly became more general and nebulous. Without the previous level of detail, my lists somehow kept getting bigger. It went unnoticed at first, but at some point, I realized what was happening.
I wasn't completing anything because I wasn't as organized, but that didn't slow the number of new projects from arising. I'd become task-saturated and far behind a number of deadlines without realizing it.
I still struggle to return to the micro-iterative lists of yore, but I've found another method of task management—focusing instead of multitasking (mostly) and communicating with others about where I'm at on things and negotiating better deadlines.
My "To Do" list is still rather monstrous, and there's a TON of things I wanna get to, but I'm doing my best to stay focused and chew each bite fully before swallowing.
Otherwise, it might eat ME. ^_^
