To paraphrase Johnny Rico from Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers:
It’s better to do something constructive immediately than to think of the best thing you could’ve done hours later.
That quote came back to me in the late spring/early summer as my job was taken away from me–and with it a lot of the routine/structure of my day.
I had a lot to do–I am a suburban homeowner with a yard and a garden and almost certainly too many hobbies–and all day to do it, so of course … almost nothing got done.
My routine had been disrupted and replaced with the stress and anxiety of finding a new job while navigating Oklahoma’s unemployment benefit system and it wasn’t like all the other stresses of my life had suddenly vanished with my job. The sudden loss of health insurance, for example, added to the load.
I needed something to remind me of what needed doing. Nothing so formal as a Covey-style [1] daily to-do list. That would have simply added more stress. So I decided to make it weekly.
I created a new notebook called “Something Constructive.” I titled the first page “Week of 9 June,” [2] then listed out a dozen or so things that I could at least do something about that week. A lot of these were little maintenance tasks (like prepping old paint cans for disposal), some were more like reminders of things that needed doing but had no real due date (like buying straw bales for use in the garden).
I didn’t really set rules for what I listed. Just shit that needed doing. At some point.
So when I found myself doing nothing, and struggling to think of something I could be doing, I had a list. I could just pick something. [3] If I finished the something, I would strike it out. If not, I would put a check next to it. See? I did something! And it was constructive!
I also add to the list as some new task presents itself.
At the end of the week, I create the next week’s list with copy-and-paste. I erase the items that are done and add some new ones.
So the notebook shows me that I am, in fact, not totally doing nothing. And even if some projects that were put on indefinite hold when things went pear-shaped still haven’t seen new progress, I know I’ll get back to them. Even if only one check mark at a time.
-David
[1] Yes, I am old enough that one of my previous jobs paid to send me to a Covey class.
[2] Sometime in the early 2K’s I adopted the European formatting for dates. I can be pretentious like that.
[3] Or, you know, not. But, hey, I did look at the list. 🙂