"To Do" Lists

Jokes, aside, I have made "To Do" Lists all of my life.  I may not have come out of the womb making them, but I started very early.  I made them when playing "School" and "House" when I was very young.  My first real ones were school related, of course.  As I became involved in organizations and after school activities, they started forming categories. Then when I got a part-time job, the lists expanded into work-related items.  Got worse as I started college.  Marriage and children complicated the whole process.

I found myself continually making lists and trying to cross off the items on each list.  Then someone came up with the "A-B-C" concept of assigning a level of importance to the list and a filing system based on those assignments.  I wish I had a dollar for every list I have made over my lifetime.

And, you know what?  I'm not done yet.  I have a household list, a Friends of the Library list, a Woman's Club list with several different categories, a Garden Club list.  My "Daily To Do" list contains elements from all the other lists and is based on a weekly schedule that I make up every Saturday.  The major difference between lists today and lists early in my life is the wonderful invention of electronic calendars and a program called, "One Note."  I love the ease of using this great Microsoft product.  I have several notebooks set up in One Note and each one helps me keep track of projects and information I need for all my activities.

I don't worry when I cannot complete everything on a particular day's list.  I just move it to the next day, reassign importance and move on with it.  My daughter inherited this particular OCD gene and I think she's better at it than her mother.  She runs rings around me when it comes to getting stuff done.

This Maxine cartoon made me laugh.

One of these days those may be my categories, too.  But not today, tomorrow or next week.