Your To-Do List Will Never Be Done Because You’re Supposed to Shed Unused Ideas – How About Monthly?
By Jennifer Dziura
4 min read
An anonymous user asked this question in r/internetparents, a Subreddit wherein you can ask thousands of parents for advice:
I have always been surprised when people complain that their to-do lists are never done.
It honestly never occurred to me that they were supposed to be. You’re never done buying food. Or going to the dentist. You’ll be done when you’re dead. Well, you’ll be done going to the dentist, but if you still have a to-do list, it almost certainly won’t be done.
This is perhaps because I am on the extreme end of list length and complexity. I have always had lists of hundreds or thousands of items, could easily lose a whole day curating and organizing the items, and often put a list aside and make a new list by grabbing only the most important items from the old list, then of course gently abandoning the old list entirely. Did you know some tarantulas shed their skin, then sit on the skin, like a comfy old blanket? (That won’t be the only uncomfortably biological metaphor you read today!) The old list is cast aside, but retained, for comfort.
If you’re like me, you add items to your list every time you wake up, before you go to bed, every time there’s a phone in your hand, and again at a drastically increased pace when coming into contact with new information. Every time I pay to attend an e-commerce conference, I come away with a list longer than I could possibly accomplish before the next year’s conference. It makes a person feel a little … bloated.
I handle some this by moving items to sub-lists with titles like “On Deck,” meaning this is a list of things to not even think about until other items on the current list are done (so don’t feel bad about not doing them), and “Maybe Someday” or “Idea Bank (Optional).” That is, I have correctly identified these undifferentiated verbal clumps as something other than a relevant, useful, and possible task.
But that still leaves quite a lot on the primary list. Often, new items are being added much faster than old items are being crossed off.
You too?
I’m here now with an idea to purge your list and keep it more manageable until your inevitable death.
Allow me to introduce … Idea Menstruation
Some humans menstruate and whether you are among them or not is not important to the metaphor.
Once a month or so, it’s useful to shed unused ideas.
What if you spent five days a month only removing items from your list, and not adding any new ones?
Hence: “idea menstruation.” Consider a day off and a pair of loose sweatpants.
If you do menstruate regularly, that could be a good reminder to do this process at the same time. Shed it all, baby!
If you do not menstruate, just put a recurring event on your calendar. You’re still entitled to a pint of ice cream while you shed ideas that are just never going to enter the lifecycle that results in my making a very awkward comparison of your plans to embryos and then fetuses.
At this point the metaphor becomes even more biological, but it’s worth pointing out that, no matter how many eggs one produces, there is a dramatic limit to the number of fetuses one can gestate at a time, or in a lifetime. The same is true of how many of your ideas can become plays, or companies, or product lines, or family trips around the world, or books, or art shows, or whatever it is you produce.
Hemingway once referred to writing as “just peristaltic action” – sometimes you just have to shit out a story, which is a very Hemingway thing to say.
Sometimes you just have to slowly bleed out all the tasks you will never do.
Monthly seems about right.
100% Human. This post was not written with AI. I think one would have to be inspired by having a uterus, and also to have the ability to experience inspiration.
