A Three Hour Tour...

So I'm obsessed with my To-Do list. Big deal.

The listmaker I'm using has a length feature where the amount of time a task will take can be estimated. So naturally I spent who knows how many minutes today entering lengths on my tasks. I noticed an "estimated time total" at the bottom of the page-- 51.5 hours so far. This gave me the idea to add up my times for daily tasks. If I manage to limit daily blogging and email to 15 minutes each (riiiiiight), I have three hours of dailies on my list. Nowhere in that total do I account for diaper changes, nursing, meals, baths, or brushing of teeth. Nowhere do I estimate minutes for soothing boo-boos, cleaning unscheduled spills (how dare a spill occur outside the schedule!), or wasting away in front of the internet. (Damn.) And none of that three hours creates space for any of the weekly, monthly, or one-time-only tasks. That's just the mundane chores I listed that have to happen every single day. Yeeps.

No wonder I never finish anything!

The Infinite To-Do List

I have made the perhaps grave error of discovering online to-do lists. It dawned on me a couple of weeks ago (yeah, ok, I'm slow as molasses about some things) that such a beastie must exist, so off I went into Googleland ISO said thing. Lo, there are many, and what a treat for my OCD self! I could spend hours entering data and not making one iota of progress toward completing any of the actual entries. Heh. Now I get an email daily, flaunting my unfinished tasks in my face. It's really much tidier than all my scraps of paper and I never lose my laptop, so I'm getting reminded of what I'm trying to accomplish at least...

The single biggest discovery I've made, though, is that it is in fact a physical impossibility to do all the things on my list for any given day. I suppose this is good to know. I don't even have any of the myriad tasks that comprise constant child care, meals, or personal hygiene listed. So I find myself waxing philosophical (as I am wont to do), this time about this annoying aspect of human behavior that causes us to expect impossible things of ourselves. Have we been so brainwashed by societal mandates that we now believe we must be able to daily achieve the Herculean? Did people torment themselves this way a hundred years ago, or fifty? Where did I acquire this sense of urgency that is now my constant companion? Must. Do. All. Things. Must. Be. All. Things. To. All. People. Ack!

I thought I had stepped quietly out of the rat race, moving into a rhythmic, expansive space, filled with the spiritual and mundane routines of maintaining a basic existence. Instead, I seem to have brought the race with me, if my lists are any indication. How can I shift this? How can I take my foot off the gas when I'm racing in an invisible car?

I welcome ideas and discussion on this topic. Stay tuned for more musings...