Recently I mentioned that I enjoy making lists. I said that list making helped to both organize me and force me into doing the things that I needed to do. This is all true. What is also true is that I don’t affectively begin to work on this until they get really long. This is not something I can easily explain. Perhaps it is just the mental structure of a list not making sense to me until it is truly a long and somewhat frightening list. Whatever the reason may be I am on able to complete at least until the list is long enough to be a challenge.
The result of this is that I wind up with a lot of things to do and I wanna feeling somewhat overwhelmed almost all of the time. Based on this reality it does not seem that list are actually a very good idea for me. Yet I continue to use them and I continue to swear by them. I guess in the end I am going to be who I am.
now the question becomes how do I use this awareness to my advantage? The most obvious and easiest way would be to not wait until the list gets big enough to be a challenge daughter to finish it in the same way that would make sense not to let the sink fill up with dishes until you wash them yet that is also what I do. Maybe the idea of the challenge is what drives me maybe my competitiveness is so raw and to my very core that I absolutely need the structure of the List challenge in order to be effective in anyway. Once, I found a app that rewarded me for completing items on my list. It was fun, but truth be told I don’t know that I am the check list kind of person. I find digital lists entirely ineffective to me. It is as if I’m adding an extra step into the process by transcribing the list to digital format, checking my device for when things are Jean, I’m finally returning to the device to check off the list and say oh it’s done. The physical way gives me this visual representation of which are filled come with the papers that I find immensely satisfying. The digital way allowed me to see a little stick figure dance across my screen. There was even one that I built a tree or a garden but I never gave it enough time to see what could come of successfully completed work. It is still loaded on my phone to this day like so much other detritus that clogs my screen.
All of this is to say I need a better way. Not so much a better way of organizing as a better way of being. I have this unfortunate tendency to rely on being behind I am being forced to come back. Yet doing so create such a massive level of stress on myself that it has made me physically ill over the course of my life. There must be a better way. Only, I do not know what that is. Such is the pursuit of life.
All of this is to say I need a better way. Not so much a better way of organizing as a better way of being. I have this unfortunate tendency to rely on being behind I am being forced to come back. Yet doing so create such a massive level of stress on myself that it has made me physically ill over the course of my life. There must be a better way. Only, I do not know what that is. Such is the pursuit of life.
When I finally sit down to write that book about being a better and more organized Reider is going to include the answers to these questions I posed over the course of this 10 minute blog day after day after day. Perhaps they’re in my answers can provide someone else with a Headstart on getting their life together so that they can be more prolific an even affected as a writer. Or at least more so than I have been over the course of my brief and not so wonderous career.