The Ad Hoc To-Do List

I strug­gle against clut­ter. I don’t like it, but it is all around me. I have to con­fess my envy of those who have placid Zen-like open homes and work­spaces. I gen­er­al­ly do a pret­ty good job with my liv­ing room, but even now I see a few piles of unopened mail, box­es, and assort­ed mis­cel­lany wait­ing to be shoved away some­where out of sight and out of mind.

Late­ly I’ve been lis­ten­ing to the 43Folders pod­casts, specif­i­cal­ly Mer­lin Man­n’s series of talks with Get­ting Things Done author David Allen. I’m wary of get­ting sucked into cre­at­ing sys­tems designed to make me more pro­duc­tive, but I’m also both­ered by my patho­log­i­cal­ly spo­radic pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and need to make a change. I’ve resist­ed GTD for some time now, as I am a big of a fan of Stephen Cov­ey’s Sev­en Habits of High­ly Effec­tive Peo­ple, and I’ve heard GTD described as the anti-Sev­en Habits.

Of course, no one has ever said the sys­tems are incom­pat­i­ble and I don’t know of any fun­da­men­tal con­flict. My best guess, not hav­ing read Get­ting Things Done yet (I bought it today) is that David Allen and Stephen Cov­ey mere­ly come from dif­fer­ent direc­tions. Cov­ey is look­ing more at the big pic­tures of per­son­al integri­ty and focus on the indi­vid­u­al’s per­son­al mis­sion and pri­or­i­ties. Allen’s work seems to be more about devel­op­ing the dai­ly bat­tle plan. My fear, there­fore, is groundless.

A recur­ring idea in the 43Folders pod­casts is that writ­ing down or cap­tur­ing the tasks and ideas that car­om around the mind is part of the process nec­es­sary to let­ting go of those sundry thoughts and get­ting to the task at hand. This makes sense. My mind is often an unfo­cused jum­ble of the things I haven’t done. I’ll sit down to work at one task and remem­ber five things I have to do, and they will nag at me.

Oth­ers have tried to change me, and it has proven a cer­tain way to pro­voke my resent­ment. How many times have I grum­bled about not being able to find some­thing that I have put «away»?

As I sat down to begin read­ing Get­ting Things Done, I glanced up at the clut­ter on my desk across the room from me and the pieces fell into place. Why is it that I can’t seem to get that desk cleaned off? Because each item there is some­thing unfin­ished, and I can’t get rid of it until I’ve made some deci­sion and can call it com­plete. There’s the emp­ty box for my med­ica­tion, whose sav­ing grace is only that it has the pre­scrip­tion num­ber on it, which I’ll need when I call for a refill. I could write that down in one of my note­books, or even put the num­ber in my cal­en­dar where it will serve also as a reminder to call at the cor­rect time. Instead, the box rests there. My cam­era is on the desk, because I would­n’t want to put it some­where I could­n’t get to it right away. The spin­dle of DVD-ROMs reminds me of the back­ups and file cleanups I keep telling myself to do. There is a nick­el-cad­mi­um bat­tery from a phone I haven’t used in five years (I think I gave the phone to Good­will over a year ago) because the label says it must be prop­er­ly recy­cled rather than tossed in the trash. I remem­ber from art skool how tox­ic cad­mi­um is, so the bat­tery sits wait­ing for me to take a few min­utes to find out where to take it to be recy­cled. An emp­ty CO₂ car­tridge remains to remind me what size car­tridge to replace it with, should I ever again decide I have some need for com­pressed CO₂.

The list does­n’t stop there, but the point that’s been com­ing home for me is that the list should start there. I have to leave all those things out because they are the visu­al reminders I’ve left for myself of the things I ought to do. The pile of clut­ter on my desk is what I’ve done because I’ve failed to make an ade­quate to-do list. It lit­er­al­ly is my brain’s ver­sion of a to-do list.

If I have all these things on a more tra­di­tion­al to-do list or a cal­en­dar which I’ll look at again, then I could store these things some­where. Some­where away. I could put them out of sight con­fi­dent that I won’t have to leave them for­ev­er undone. Real­is­ti­cal­ly, if I nev­er get them done, then they won’t be an eye­sore, and if I nev­er get them done, it won’t be because I’ve for­got­ten them, it will be because they won’t have become a priority.

I look for­ward to the day when I’ll have a clut­tered to-do list, and a tidy desk rather than a clut­tered desk and a dai­ly plan­ner most­ly full of blank pages.