How to get everything done and the someday list
Tell me if you recognise this? You have a massive list of things to do. You occasionally might tick a few things off it but mostly you look at this huge list and it's just completely depressing because there's so much on it that you know you will never get to do. “How to get everything done!? How can I get my life in order?!” I hear you cry!
Well, the answer is, you don’t! And, I have a solution for you; it's called the Someday list.
Look at your normal to-do list. How much on that list really needs to be done in the next week or even in the next few months? We have so many things on our amorphous lists that when we don’t seem to be making any progress on ticking them off, we feel like a failure. “I've got so much to do I'm never going to get all this done!”, “why can't I do it!”. And here is the simple answer: these things, are things that we have no intention of doing in the immediate future. We put them on our list because we don't want to forget about them, but we have no intention, or need, of doing them any time soon.
An example might be “clear out the garage”. I'm not planning to do that anytime soon, I might do it when it gets to summer for example, but by seeing it on there distracts me from the things that I actually need to do, and makes me feel crap!
Another example of a thing like this could be “research holidays that we want to do over the next five years”. I mean it would be nice to do that but it's not essential and doesn't really matter if I don't do it even within the next year. But it's crowding my to-do list!
Things like books to read or TV shows to watch also sometimes clutter our To Do List purely because we are adding them to a place that is a memory prompt for us so we don't forget them.
Now here's the answer you create a someday list for everything like this that doesn't have to be done in the next few months, or even in the next year. It could have categories if you like - books to read, Netflix series to watch, big projects to start. We can glance at it occasionally maybe pick one thing off it to do if we happen to have a spare day. We know we're capturing everything so we won't forget about that stuff, but it doesn't make us feel like a failure every time we look at our daily To Do List which includes things we actually NEED to do today, like send back that form for the upcoming school trip for example!
So what do you think? Will you try this? Let me know! Follow me over on Instagram for more like this! link here:
