Did It!

Office supplies are a kind of crack for me. Sticky notes, little notebooks, coloured pens – it’s like the adult version of new school supplies and believe me, I have a problem. A while back I found this awesome ‘to do’ list notebook with two columns ‘to do now’ and ‘to do later’. I did a little squee for a moment, and then promptly checked out with my newest acquisition in the ‘too many pretty notebooks’ department of my life.

In all fairness, I have made use of this notebook on more than one occasion and it is really nice to have the ‘to do later ‘column for those things that need to be done, and I don’t want to forget about, but I don’t need to do Right This Very Minute.

Unfortunately, sometimes this to do list just ends up depressing me: You know what I’m talking about don’t you? It’s that day when you have a ‘to do’ list with twenty items on it… or thirty… or forty… let’s not count them shall we!? Where was I? That over-whelming to do list and you think to yourself, there is NO way, maybe I should just write a To Do list of one thing like – ‘Clean the toilet’ because probably I can get that accomplished and feel like a worth-while human being. This was an actual thought I had Saturday night as I went to bed.

And this actual thought was a car on the next thought train, which went something like this: You know, to do lists are really helpful to help me get my thoughts organized, but when the to do list doesn’t change for several days it’s a little depressing, and you know, it’s not like I do NOTHING on those days when nothing gets marked off the to do list, I do plenty of stuff, and really a to do list is a lot like glass half-empty sort of thinking, it’s all about what you have yet to accomplish, not what you’ve accomplished and what if I wrote out a ‘did it!’ list instead?

So on Sunday morning I woke up and I decided that since I had a ‘to do’ list that had looked much the same for a week, I was going to instead write out a ‘did it!’ list. Every time I did something, whether it was on the to do list or not, it went on the ‘Did it!’ list.

This lasted until about 4:30 in the afternoon so anything after that sort of didn’t get on the did it! list, but you know what? My cup was definitely half-full… maybe even totally full. This list is far less depressing than my ‘to do’ list, and at the end of the day, I marked a bunch of things off that ‘to do’ list too.

The ‘Did It!’ list isn’t really going to help you get organized, but if you’ve been staring at that ‘to do’ list and it hasn’t budged – I recommend trying the ‘Did It!’ list. Whether or not you mark a single thing off your ‘to do’ list that day, you will get to see what you have accomplished with your day – and sometimes some of the important stuff (Story time! Cuddle time! Cup of coffee time!) never makes it on a ‘to do’ list, but your day wouldn’t be right without it.

Cheers,
C.