dragonlady7 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dragonlady7) wrote2018-12-09 10:39 pm
dragonlady7) wrote2018-12-09 10:39 pm
to-do lists
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lazaefair replied to your post “Now that I’ve set myself up over on Dreamwidth I’m posting there more,…”
Your post is giving me sympathy panic. the only way I can get through that shit is by writing the entire to-do list down and breaking it down to the teeny-tiniest increments, AND continually reminding myself that it’s okay for me not to finish it. So when I find myself wondering what to do I can go back to the list to remind myself. And I can cross things off the list for that little dopamine rush.
oh my god I have SUCH a love-hate with to-do lists
i love making the lists, see, but the problem is that I have absolutely no idea how long a thing takes to do. I just don’t. So a to-do list for a single weekend might consist of three hundred hours’ worth of work, if you could actually do the math out. And the other thing I’m bad at is, on a large scale, understanding the dependencies of tasks? So I’ll tell myself that I need to Do Some Big Thing but then I have no idea where to start, and I’ll try to come up with smaller detailed things but I’ll get to that item and then it needs me to have done fifteen other little things first?
I love lists. I write basically fanfic about what my life would be like if I could fucking do anything ever.
I have not been able to have friends over for about a decade because my house is too messy for anyone to get in the door. How do you fix that?
Well, I know how you don’t. You write “CLEAN KITCHEN” on your to-do list, and then you think, well, ok, I need more detail, that’s just silly, and you write “MOP KITCHEN FLOOR” and you’re like oh I’ll have to sweep first, and you write “SWEEP AND MOP KITCHEN FLOOR” instead, and you’re all pleased, and you spend your afternoon at work daydreaming about how clean that floor is going to be when you get home.
And then you get home and well, you can’t actually… mostly… see the floor in that room, and so you need to take out the recycling, and then you need to gather up all the film plastic recycling too, and you get that out the door and that’s great, and then you do the dishes, and that’s as much as I’ve gotten done this weekend, I’ve done the dishes like fifteen times because every time I go to do another bit of the big “CLEAN KITCHEN” to-do item on my beautiful list, there are more dirty dishes and I can’t do anything until I get those out of the way. And I’m also trying to do Christmas shopping and I really wanted to sit and write for a moment, well I’ll get to that later, maybe tomorrow, oh it’s Sunday already, well ok I won’t do any writing this weekend, fine, but I still have to–
Oop, weekend’s over, maybe next time?
That’s how you go four years without sweeping your kitchen floor.
So… no, to-do lists don’t really help me much. Lists are crucial– the Christmas gifts have lists to go along with them, and I’ve written down dimensions and things, and it’s possible some of them will get done now that they’re written down. Because things that aren’t written down don’t exist, to me, so they don’t happen.
But task lists don’t really help me much overall. I’m thirty-nine years old and I’ve never actually learned how to write a list of things that are actually possible in this world.
On Monday I’ll go back to work and look sadly at my list of what I was going to do this weekend (CLEAN KITCHEN was one two items of about twelve, and another one was PUT AWAY CLOTHES which is going to involve three rooms of the house and is a huge undertaking I’ve started working on about twenty times in the last two years, to give some idea), and then I’ll sit and start a new list and daydream about what it would be like if I were the sort of bitch who could actually write a reasonable to-do list and follow it.
At this very moment in my house if I had a kind of magical summoning ability so I could pull them out of the acres of shit in here, I could probably produce a stack for you of hundreds of to-do lists I’ve written myself, and not a single one of them has more than two items crossed off on it, no matter how many items there are. And I can’t throw them out until I finish them, or the tasks I’ve conjured will cease to exist.
(Your picture was not posted)
lazaefair replied to your post “Now that I’ve set myself up over on Dreamwidth I’m posting there more,…”
Your post is giving me sympathy panic. the only way I can get through that shit is by writing the entire to-do list down and breaking it down to the teeny-tiniest increments, AND continually reminding myself that it’s okay for me not to finish it. So when I find myself wondering what to do I can go back to the list to remind myself. And I can cross things off the list for that little dopamine rush.
oh my god I have SUCH a love-hate with to-do lists
i love making the lists, see, but the problem is that I have absolutely no idea how long a thing takes to do. I just don’t. So a to-do list for a single weekend might consist of three hundred hours’ worth of work, if you could actually do the math out. And the other thing I’m bad at is, on a large scale, understanding the dependencies of tasks? So I’ll tell myself that I need to Do Some Big Thing but then I have no idea where to start, and I’ll try to come up with smaller detailed things but I’ll get to that item and then it needs me to have done fifteen other little things first?
I love lists. I write basically fanfic about what my life would be like if I could fucking do anything ever.
I have not been able to have friends over for about a decade because my house is too messy for anyone to get in the door. How do you fix that?
Well, I know how you don’t. You write “CLEAN KITCHEN” on your to-do list, and then you think, well, ok, I need more detail, that’s just silly, and you write “MOP KITCHEN FLOOR” and you’re like oh I’ll have to sweep first, and you write “SWEEP AND MOP KITCHEN FLOOR” instead, and you’re all pleased, and you spend your afternoon at work daydreaming about how clean that floor is going to be when you get home.
And then you get home and well, you can’t actually… mostly… see the floor in that room, and so you need to take out the recycling, and then you need to gather up all the film plastic recycling too, and you get that out the door and that’s great, and then you do the dishes, and that’s as much as I’ve gotten done this weekend, I’ve done the dishes like fifteen times because every time I go to do another bit of the big “CLEAN KITCHEN” to-do item on my beautiful list, there are more dirty dishes and I can’t do anything until I get those out of the way. And I’m also trying to do Christmas shopping and I really wanted to sit and write for a moment, well I’ll get to that later, maybe tomorrow, oh it’s Sunday already, well ok I won’t do any writing this weekend, fine, but I still have to–
Oop, weekend’s over, maybe next time?
That’s how you go four years without sweeping your kitchen floor.
So… no, to-do lists don’t really help me much. Lists are crucial– the Christmas gifts have lists to go along with them, and I’ve written down dimensions and things, and it’s possible some of them will get done now that they’re written down. Because things that aren’t written down don’t exist, to me, so they don’t happen.
But task lists don’t really help me much overall. I’m thirty-nine years old and I’ve never actually learned how to write a list of things that are actually possible in this world.
On Monday I’ll go back to work and look sadly at my list of what I was going to do this weekend (CLEAN KITCHEN was one two items of about twelve, and another one was PUT AWAY CLOTHES which is going to involve three rooms of the house and is a huge undertaking I’ve started working on about twenty times in the last two years, to give some idea), and then I’ll sit and start a new list and daydream about what it would be like if I were the sort of bitch who could actually write a reasonable to-do list and follow it.
At this very moment in my house if I had a kind of magical summoning ability so I could pull them out of the acres of shit in here, I could probably produce a stack for you of hundreds of to-do lists I’ve written myself, and not a single one of them has more than two items crossed off on it, no matter how many items there are. And I can’t throw them out until I finish them, or the tasks I’ve conjured will cease to exist.
(Your picture was not posted)