I find that frequently when I get home I sort of let my thoughts meander, never really focusing on anything, and as a consequence I get nothing done. Needless to say, there’s plenty to do, but a combination of fatigue and proclivity for the path of least resistance result in lethargy. It’s an oxymoron, then, that I actually feel better when I resist the temptation to be sedentary and actually force myself to take care of business, so the other day I decided I was going to try something new.
I find that lists help me to be more active. Some psychological effect of a having a neat and organized array of tasks, coupled with the reward of a strikethrough upoin their completion, gives the little motivatioal bump that I need to get over the hill. Until recently, my lists were haphazard – just write down whatever needed to be done on a piece of scratch paper and then do it. Obviously this method is prone to a lot of error. Forgetfulness, neglect, and misplacement collude to render it ineffectual. In searching for the light, I decided to create a spreadsheet eumerating all of my daily, weekly, biweekly, etc. tasks. Here’s an example:
Green squares represent successfully completed tasks, red incomplete tasks, and blue unnecessary tasks.
The spreadsheet solves two of the aforementioned problems: it’s difficult to lose unless my computer vanishes, and it seems to recall the tasks better than I can. Alas, it doesn’t negate issues resulting from neglect, but to my knowledge no one has yet invented a machine that can. In any case, it seems to be working quite well, so I am going to try to keep it going. In fact, if you look closely, you’ll see that, as a result of this post, I’m off to fill a square green right now!
