One of the reasons I’m such a big fan of keeping records and analyzing how you work is you realize two things. The first is that we’ve all got our little quirks and you’ll almost immediately start to recognize patterns that amount to Your Individual Weirdness. Stuff you do because you can’t help it, quirks that recur in your process, often maddening little habits you can’t seem to eradicate despite your best efforts.
And this will force you to acknowledge the second thing, which is that you’ve really got two choices here: You either find a way to workconquer this particular Weirdness… or you find a way to make it work for you.
Here’s a silly one from me.
Despite having a million To Do lists and Kanban boards that I use regularly, I can’t seem to shake the need for a good old fashioned paper To Do list. Well, more exactly, multiple To Do lists, usually one that’s a running list of long term projects and one that’s a more immediate list of what needs to get done that day. Yes, this info is duplicated digitaly, but sometimes you just need the feel of crossing something off a list with a pen.
Another quirk of mine?
A nice neat list of things I have to finish before the end of today? Pleasing, satisfying.
A mess of a list where there are some things crossed off, but not all? Stressful, looks messy, we hates it, precious.
Except having to transfer the un-finished tasks leftover from the old list to the new fresh list feels like admitting defeat and is demoralizing so I’ll often live with the messy half-finished list for a while, getting increasingly irritated by it.
I fully acknowledge that this a Me Problem. I tried to force myself to just get over it and remake the lists every night or rely on digital only but, while I do that most days for the daily list, it just didn’t work for me for everything.
Instead I’ve decided to just accept that this is my own particular weirdness and make it work for me.
At the start of each season, I make a pretty list of things I want done by the end of this season. It’s color coded and decorated by the season, a cutesy, ascetically pleasing list of everything I’d like to do in the next three months that I keep right in front of my face.
Except, you guessed it, as time passes and I cross things off the list, it gets messy and starts to irk me.
Right now, my Winter Goals list is a mess of checks and strike-thrus and I am positively antsy to make a nice fresh Spring-styled goals list. But I know it’s going to drive me nuts to have to move the last few unfinished things on the list to the new list. So I just pit these two quirks against each other and make them battle it out for my benefit.
Which means I’m highly motivated to cross the last few things off my Winter Goals list this week (well, last week because I wrote this then and forgot to post it), because I know it means finally getting to remake that nice fresh Spring Goals list without having to carry over the shame of the things I never go to finish.
Is this kinda silly? Is it all ultimately just an arbitrary set of rules I’ve made up for myself with no consequence other than I’ll be mildly annoyed if it doesn’t work out as planned? Yup! But it works really well for me and has for the 2 years+ so I’ve made it a key part of my process.
Does this mean you too should start becoming weird about paper lists? No, of course not, unless you think it would work for you. But I offer it as an example of how paying attention to how I worked made me recognize a quirk I could work with to help myself get more done.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to knock those last few things off my list so I can make my nice pretty Spring list!
PS: if you’re wondering, this list is usually larger tasks that can’t be done in a single day, but something like “call knee doctor” ends up there because I’d been putting it off so monumentally I needed to guilt trip myself into actually getting it done by putting in on the big projects list
Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer who loves writing of all kinds except for writing bios like this.
