To do
I love August. The weather has been glorious, the schedule considerably less frantic, and the opportunity is finally here for me – as well as many others – to relax, take some time off, and work at a calm and leisurely pace through the friendly pile of tasks to be done. Academic conference season is over, and it’s a chance to relax. Right?
It’s also, of course, prime time to get ahead. The new academic year is anywhere between about four and six weeks away, and lecture planning course outlines and reading lists can be contemplated with a less panicked eye, over a glass of wine, or lounging on a picnic rug rather than sitting in the autumnal semi-darkness of an artificially-lit office. This is the moment when we draw up our ‘to do’ lists for the rest of the year, and start crossing things off, with an increasing sense of urgency, between now and the arrival of our new cohort of students.
Last week, as I was lazing by the seaside in the sun, I started to think about this. Not about the list of tasks awaiting me on my desk at home – but about the significance of said list. About the number of lists in my life. And indeed, the number of planning documents full stop: calendars, diaries, work planners, tick lists, phone reminders, email tasks, and so on. They are all useful, all good ways of structuring time, and thankfully (for me, anyway) not so frequent or intensive that I get to the point of wanting to jam a machete through my laptop screen just to stop the ceaseless jangling messages. In this, I know I am very lucky.
I was also thinking of something else. At home, back on my kitchen table, sat my journal. I am not a dedicated daily diarist: I have neither the patience nor the diligence to write something for every passing day. But I do keep a record of sorts, usually at least one a week, of happenings and thoughts, memorable conversations, funny jokes and uncharted trains of reasoning or emotional unpicking. It’s a relatively new habit, picked up about four years ago, and I enjoy it. Periodically I stick in photos or bus tickets, coasters and other fragments of particularly memorable occasions. It’s thought-provoking to write, and eye-opening to read: amazing how often the mind plays tricks in terms of how long we think we’ve been worrying about, or panicking over something, or how significant a given event may have been at the time.
And then (as I continued to lie in the sun and idly think this thing through), I had a sort of epiphany. Is it not extremely strange that most of us dedicate so much of our time to writing down what needs to be achieved… and as soon as we’ve done it, we cross it off and dispose of the paper without further comment or record? We measure our success in terms of how short the to-do list becomes, of how much we’ve managed to jettison from it. And yet really, the thing to celebrate is what we’ve managed to do, which we don’t usually write down. However much lists can help us, in the end they can come to rule our days in such a way that a good day or a bad day is determined with how much we have affected the list, not how many interesting or unique or difficult things we may have done.
So I have a little challenge for you. And I’ll try to do it as well. If, like me, you use lists to organise your days, then that’s all well and good, and you should keep doing that if it’s helpful. BUT you also have to start another list, and this one is designed to get longer, not shorter. Every week, you need to write down a minimum of three things that you’ve actually done. Maybe you finished an essay, or mastered a tricky passage in a piano piece, or visited a place you’ve never been before. Maybe you met someone really interesting. Maybe you managed to cook an omelette and flip it without it instantly falling to bits (which took me ages to master). It doesn’t matter what it is: the point is to create a to-done list. Not a CV, or a Record of Achievement, which tend to be the only (potentially embarrassing and cringe-worthy) documents we are encouraged to regularly update with a list of our work, tasks and professional positions. This is going to be a list for you. So that when you look back at it, in six months’ time, it won’t be the kind of list that you despair of in its length and complexity, and all the work it entails. It will, instead, be the kind of list that you can remember proudly, and see all the things you’ve done, big or small, and enjoy the satisfaction of that achievement. I bet you’ll have forgotten some of them, too, by the time you look back at the list. Let’s take a minute out from being so terribly busy and tied down by lists, and instead savour what we’ve completed, experienced or perfected.
What do you say? Comment below, or tweet @klhamilton if you want to share your list of three. Or keep them quietly to yourself, and enjoy the satisfaction of remembering all the amazing things that you do, every single week.
