The Secret Properties of the To-Do List
This post is a reminder to myself about my principles of how to use To-Do lists to save energy and time. To-Do lists used properly have embedded properties that go beyond being a way to keep tasks organized. I am outlining these embedded properties, and how they emerge, here.
To-Do lists give you something to do when you are feeling bad. They also give you something to do when you are feeling good, and do not want to be complacent. This means that in either circumstance, they have some special properties.
It is good to think of some things to do for the next day, the night before. It takes energy in the middle of the day, to think about what you are doing next. This takes a lot of energy, the type of energy that is similar to walking around the house looking for something that you need, or remembering a phone number you need to call and not being able to look it up, or not knowing what you are going to wear and all of your clothes are dirty, and knowing you have to go out. When you have to think about things you need to do, but those things are in the near-future, not the immediate future, you can take joy and pleasure in thinking about them, and make space in your mind to make any edits that are necessary, or metabolize it such that things that feel painful can actually be joys.
You can schedule pain! You can add things to your to-do list that you know are going to be painful, so that they are painful by choice and design. For example, perhaps you want to drill guitar for 15 minutes every day. Not leisurely playing, but actually do drills to that you improve. You know that this is a kind of pain that is not so bad, even a joyful kind of pain that would make other kinds of pain throughout the day more bearable, since you have a fun “scheduled” pain.
You can schedule things like calling people, going out to events, things like this. This way you can add things that are pleasurable that you love doing. I don’t think it “takes away the pleasure” to schedule these things. I think it means you are doing these more often, and therefore get more pleasure. Of course, you can also do them spontaneously when you are feeling like it, when it comes up.
You can schedule boring things to remember to do them. These are things like spring cleaning, cleaning out your fridge. When you plan them, you can remember to coincide them with other things. For example, perhaps you are doing boring paperwork while some stupid show you normally would not have time for plays in the background. Or you are cleaning the fridge while listening to an audiobook.
There are special joys that emerge *only* in the format of a to-do list. For example, challenging yourself to do something very quickly. Or challenging yourself to do something a number of times in a row. Without the to-do list, constructing such funny games with yourself becomes basically an impossibility, because you need to be tracking it on a meta-level.