To Do List

I’ve been trying to balance a ton of stuff lately, between poker, my writing, my work with the Boston Debate League and the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues, my finances, etc. I’m also kind of absent minded and procrastinatory, so I’ve started keeping a To Do list. It’s just a Word document that sits on the Desktop of my computer, but I think it’s helped me to keep myself a little better organized and on top of important business than I otherwise would be.

In terms of preventing procrastination, it’s kind of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, seeing the same stuff on there every day motivates me to do it eventually just because I am sick of looking at it. I even get a little thrill from deleting items and setting arbitrary goals for myself, like getting it down to two pages, etc.

However, it also sometimes becomes an excuse to procrastinate. If, for example, I am feeling like I ought to do something productive, I’ll sometimes satiate that urge and get a sense of accomplishment simply by adding new things to the list rather than actually doing them. Or, I’ll pick some easy or trivial thing on the list and do that rather than doing something more important. Since they are each just one line on a Word document, the list gets shorter whether the task I accomplish is small or large. It’s funny that I realize and acknowledge this but ‘cheat’ myself anyway, and even funnier that it works.

By the way, the line “To Do List” under the “Blog” category (yes, there are categories) can now be deleted. Yay! That was the sound of something important getting put off another day.