It’s easy for me to start new things, unfortunately to a fault when I’ll have a to-do list filled to the brim with no plan in sight of how to actually finish any of them.
This goes for pretty much everything in my life – writing, work, personal stuff … my life is more or less run by to-do lists, to the point where I often find myself spending more time managing said lists than I do actually completing and getting things off of them.
And that’s a problem! But it’s a problem that I’m aware of, and I’m trying to do better at it.
It’s especially painful when I look at some of my lists now and can single out a dozen or so tasks that might take less than five minutes a piece … reason asks why in the world I didn’t just do the task when I was putting it on the list! Of course, there are some valid excuses – like maybe it’s a writing idea that I literally got at 3:30am and noted down from the comforts of my pillow, or maybe I was in the middle of working on a much larger task at the time and didn’t want to interrupt myself.
Either way, now it’s going to take me an hour to blow through all twelve of them in one shot, which is a much grander feat than simply knocking out a few simple things here and there.
I think a bigger part of doing this better in 2015, though, is simply in identifying one or more of the larger tasks in a given list and saying, “I’m going to get one or two of those done today – no matter what.” so that in theory at the end of the day I can always look back and say that at least I did that as opposed to a few random things here or there, but nothing really of any substance that’ll make me feel good about circling back to the list to begin again tomorrow.
There have been far too many days in the past couple of weeks when I go to bed feeling that I was completely and utterly unproductive with the time that I was given, so maybe instead of just incessantly making lists and getting a little done on a few of them, my time might be better spent just honing in one less things and following them through all of the way ’til the very end.