6 AM – Wake up, Meen!
6:15 AM – Important Task No. 1
7:30 AM – A Comparatively Relaxing Task
. . .
and so the list goes on- the last thing I write at night, just before going to bed and the first thing I see in the morning- which, by the way, is mostly post 8 AM, unlike what the To-Do List says. On waking up at this time, I say to myself, “So I need to skip a few tasks so that I can stick to the timeline that my To-Do list asks me to.” And thus I skip the ‘important’ tasks that I had assigned in those time slots. This has been happening intermittently on a regular basis for more than two years now and yet I have been failing continuously to recognize the problem it has been causing.
Many people that I know and who know about my To-Do Lists have praised me on many occasions for being so ‘systematic’ and meticulous and I, in turn, get encouraged by them and feel very proud of myself, but knowing deep down that I have failed in it. So this made me think whether these lists are really beneficial or not.
To be honest, I have not witnessed a ‘fully-ticked’ list at the end of any day. But yes, on some days, I have managed to – by doing the tasks hurriedly without applying my full focus or by reducing the span for specific tasks (which are usually the most important ones) – because all I want to see is a fully-ticked list no matter whether I perform them with good quality outcomes or not. This gives me a false sense of completion of all the tasks and thereby makes it look like a paper tiger.
Another fact I realized is that I’m probably the worst at predicting the time required to complete a task effectively, the result being all the tasks being jammed and sandwiched together with no leisure time. Having said that, this list does include small 30 minute breaks in between but are almost always spent preoccupied with the approaching of the next time slot.
On some occasions, I have even skipped very important tasks and replaced them with the easier ones that my ever-adaptive To-Do List suggested.
On some other days, when I skip preparing the list, I find myself getting frenzied and restless and not knowing what to do or where to start from. It was then that it occurred to me that these lists were, in a way, dominating, controlling, binding and captivating me to an extent that in their absence, I am a zero. Exactly around this time, I came across an article by a popular website on the ineffectiveness of the To-Do Lists and the distractions they cause. It stated that in order to avoid this, the only thing to be done is replacing the ‘To-Do List’ with a ‘Schedule Planner’ – though they both may sound the same, there is a huge difference with respect to their application.
(Without stopping abruptly) Here is the link to one of the articles on the same: https://www.nirandfar.com/schedule-maker/
TheIncurableOptimist 