Impulse

Recently, a friend of mine told me, “You are being crushed by the weight of your to-do lists!“
Let’s see, my to-do list has about 50 items on it. My list of projects that I want to start is 185 items long (this is after a recent purge dur­ing which I cut my list in half). Then there’s the daily prac­tice things like exer­cis­ing, prac­tic­ing ger­man, writ­ing, tak­ing a few pho­tos.
She may have a point.

My friend handed down her judg­ment on my to-do lists after lis­ten­ing to me whine to her for an hour about how I felt that I had not accom­plished any­thing this year. I flour­ished my project list as evi­dence — so many great ideas and not a one started.
Like a good fol­lower of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, I’ve dili­gently recorded every­thing that I’d like to done. The idea is to save all these ideas in a sys­tem that allows me to quickly and effi­ciently get things done. Because I get things done, I can trust the sys­tem, and because I trust the sys­tem, I feel less stress. That’s the idea any­way. The prob­lem is that my cre­ative mind thinks up 5 – 10 inter­est­ing projects each day, but, being merely human, I can only fin­ish one a day at best. So they accu­mu­late. Even with bru­tal triage ses­sions, the list grows. It becomes a mass of unful­filled desire — demand­ing my atten­tion, yet deny­ing sat­is­fac­tion. I’d put tremen­dous pres­sure on myself to get things done. I’d pro­cras­ti­nate like mad or when I would work, I’d be filled with resent­ment.
So, maybe she’s right. I’m going to give it a try — I’m ban­ish­ing my to-do and project lists for the next few months to see how things go. This leaves me with only one ques­tion: “What do I want to do today?“
Curiously, I’m already much hap­pier and much more moti­vated to get stuff done.