Are You Organized or Anesthetized?

There are two kinds of people on this planet:

Photo credit: Ross Angus

1. Those who organize themselves with a To Do list, and
2. Those who distract themselves with a To Do list

(And, no, I’m not forgetting people who navigate their day without making any lists at all… I’m ignoring them.)

Ignoring things – particularly difficult tasks – is one of my many useless skills, like being able to wiggle my scalp without touching it (A talent I evidently share only with Billy Tyler from the eighth grade.)

Distracting myself is a marginally more functional, if not useful skill than wiggling my scalp. Why? Because they carry collateral benefits.

For example, you can tell weeks when I have a particularly challenging writing assignment because the dishes are washed and stacked, the bathroom is scrubbed, the laundry is washed and folded, the beds are made and the flat is vacuumed…

And the vacuum bag is changed out…

And old bag is carried out with the trash…

Some of my busiest weeks occur when I’m explicitly not doing something, like staring at the blank page that every writing assignment begins with.

Like many people, I list important goals for the week, and some of those goals can be pretty daunting. The problem is that lists – my lists, anyway – can become rote. Every week has its invoices, its client prospecting tasks, its blog posts. But if that’s all that makes my list, chances are I’m focusing on the trees, rather than the forest – and that’s the surest path to professional mediocrity.

I wonder how many of us confuse maintaining our jobs with advancing our careers. How many fail to set time aside to examine long term goals, dream big, or maybe chart a path to that project we’ll start whenever things “calm down” a bit? How often do we stop to wonder why we’re always running, and never getting closer to our lifelong goals?

This blog was, for many months, too daunting a task to ever land on my To Do lists. Now that I’ve launched it, however, I’ve become dimly aware that I’m putting off even bigger challenges. Things like developing and adding registered content to my website. Or launching a direct mail or email campaign to help build my business. Or maybe actually drafting a kick-ass creative essay just to remind myself that I can, and then pitching it somewhere.

The trick, of course, isn’t to simply add “write essay” to my list. It’s too big. No, the trick is to list small and innocuous steps, like carrying around a notebook to start collecting ideas when they occur. Next week, I might plan to sift through those ideas to search for themes… and so on.

I’m convinced I’m not alone here. Most people, I think, have some higher goal or project that they think about – or maybe even talk about occasionally. Why not add a small step toward that goal to your To Do list RIGHT NOW?