i don’t remember when i first started making to-do lists, but i have a feeling that it marked the beginning of my long, winding, turbulent relationship with perfectionism and an impulse to maintain some semblance of control over an ultimately uncontrollable life.
nowadays i am not too organized about the form in which my to-dos appear: i mix and match pen and paper checklists, apple notes & evernote & Logseq (my main note-taking app), and orange-shaded tasks on my google calendar. i use whatever medium feels most intuitive at the moment a to-do first crosses my mind, along with an approximate computation of its urgency multiplied against the likelihood of my forgetting about it without any prompts to take action. for the most urgent items i typically use pen-and-paper placed in a strategic location within my line of sight in the mornings (like on the dining room table). I will schedule medium-urgency-and-or-medium-forgetfulness items as tasks on my calendar, and slot the less-likely-to-forget/less urgent items somewhere into my digital notes.
lurking among my organized to-do chaos is a storm cloud of fear that i’ll forget something which was very important to me, that the gaps left unfilled by my brain will somehow betray the desires of my heart. and hovering just next to that fear is another, nebulous meta-layer of angst that by doling out my life’s activities in to-dos i am exactly like J. Alfred Prufrock, whittling away my life with coffee spoons, too afraid to disturb the universe or eat a peach.
You too? Yes, the endless lists and the worry of forgetting. I love lined post-it notes. And, I think I just read the longest poem I have ever liked! It is beautiful.