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Does Your 'To-Do' List Run Your Life?
An unexpected change of plans can sometimes change your perspective on life.
Posted November 26, 2023 Reviewed by Jessica Schrader
Key points
- Making a to-do list gets you organized, but it shouldn't rule your life.
- Consider whether your to-do list helps you build a life-work balance or gets in the way of opportunities.
- Ask yourself whether you are willing to ditch your to-do list if something fun comes along.
I take aqua-fit classes five days a week, every week, without fail. This allows me to pretend I’m retired. But I’m not.
Last week, our instructor’s father died, and classes were canceled. As usual, I got up on time and went to the pool, on this occasion, to sign a card for the instructor. My plan, after signing the card, was to go home and start working. I had a book to review, a critique to write, and a post to share on Psychology Today.
Then two of my fellow aqua-fit friends suggested, since we didn’t have class, that we go out for coffee.
A spontaneous change of plans to have coffee with friends might sound like an innocent proposal: no classes; therefore, let’s hang out and have coffee together. But for me, it was a total turnaround.
The inclination to work every odd second that comes along is a deeply engrained response to my life as a freelance writer. My knee-jerk reaction to a canceled anything is to take advantage of the situation, go home and edit a story, or start writing a new post.
On a whim, I decided to ditch work and have coffee with my friends.
Like most self-employed/freelance workers, I am a compulsive “many-tasker."
There’s a difference between multi-tasking (i.e., doing more than one thing at a time, as in talking on the phone to your best friend while doing your taxes) and many-tasking (i.e., having more than one thing to accomplish in a day).
Being self-employed is way different than having, what my mother always called, a real job. Real jobs are ones where you work in an office... not at home. Real jobs start when you arrive in the office and end when you finish for the day and go home.
It’s that “finish” thing that is absent or illusive when you’re self-employed.
That unexpected coffee date challenged me to rethink my inclination to chart the course of my day by the to-do list sitting on my desk.
I have been a freelance writer for my entire career. That may sound romantic but being my own boss has forced me to become deeply wedded to a daily to-do list, filled with deadlines as well as all the other things in life I had to manage, like grocery shopping, laundry, cooking meals, running a household, raising three children, and being a wife.
If you have had to shift your neatly scheduled 9-5 office job to working from home during COVID, squeezing your work into every day or night crack you could find in your new non-traditional work life on your dining room table side-by-side with your now homeschooling children, I think you’ll understand what I’m saying.
I generally make my to-do list in the morning before I start work so I have a clear notion of what I need to accomplish that day. One day at a time… that’s about all I can manage.
At the end of every day, Peggy Payne, my good friend and fellow author, makes out her to-do list for the next day. I, myself, don’t think I would sleep well if I knew what that list had in store for the next day.
After that unexpected coffee date, I spent the next three days letting go of my self-imposed “to-do list.” If I had a story to edit or an errand to run, I took my time and didn’t rush to the next thing on my list. I even took all day Tuesday off from work to go to a museum with my husband and have lunch.
Taking time off for coffee with friends or a trip to a museum with my husband might not sound life-changing, but for me, it was a revelation.
Making to-do lists is an easy way to stay on track, but the lists have a tendency to feel far more important than what you might want to do instead… like taking care of yourself or just having fun.
Have I decided to give up my to-do lists and many-tasking writing life and retire?
Not yet, but I’m hoping these couple of days of ignoring what I think needs to be done versus what I might enjoy doing have opened a door for me to rediscover what I need to do for myself to have a better work/life balance.
It’s a lesson in letting go that has the potential of making life just a little less stressful and a whole lot more fun.
Go ahead… try it.
