Day 25 – Dealing with To-Do lists

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As long as I can remember going back, I've always taken notes and made to-do-lists. But then again, I'm also the type of person who likes to have things in order, otherwise I miss the big picture..... or rather the details....lol

Workwise, I used to make piles, 1. priorety, 2. priorety etc. That way, I always got the most important stuff out of the way. At least, it worked for me and my job then.

At home, living with a man who was away 3-4 weeks (or longer) at a time, I came up with a to-do-list for the house. I mangage a lot of things, but leave everything that has to do with something electrical for my husband.....lol Besides, he's not one to sit still for hours anyways. So instead of keep telling him about something that needed attention and he forgot, I made a to-do-list for each and every room in the house and also one for the outsides. So when he got home, when ever he felt like it, he would go over the list and see if he wanted to fix any of the items..... and it was not always the case....lol But, the list served us both, because we didn't have to nag each other about things that needed to be done (yes there was items on it for me as well ;-) ) and we also had and overall look at if anything important needed to be fixed.

Then I got sick and the lists didn't get done. But we have talked about making them again once we get a new home. For the same reasons as I mentioned, but also because my memory isn't always so good AND we are not getting any younger :)

Pedram talks about the stress that comes because you don't complete the list you make. I think it depends on how much you put on that list and if you've set a timeframe for finishing. We do tend to get stressed over the items that don't get completed. So making the list a bit more timebased, like the challenge where you should schedule things in your calendar to get them done, would work in many cases. At the same time, if it's not related to your workload where you may not be in a possition to determine if it's an important task or not, on the private level, you can use this to weed out things that might not be so important after all and wich is only steeling away your energy.

Priorities :)

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