For the past few years, living up to my millennial self, I’ve tried to incorporate technology as a supplement for my daily routine. Adding an assembly of “productivity” apps to my roster as a means of sparking motivation. Though most things run their course and ultimately lead to the déjà vu of concluding that the best “tech” I can and should embrace is pen and paper. That is, till the next shiny thing comes along and I lose my train of thought and wait for the next periodic déjà vu. It’s a ceaseless cycle, but not as miserable as I make it sound.
I’ve journaled. Bullet Journaled. Used calendars. Purchased white boards and pin boards to chart out my entire life and habits, like the trope they use in movies to find the killer where everything is strewn out in the open connected by red threads. Gratitude journals. Diaries. Keeping reminders for every tiny thing. “Drink a glass of water every hour”. But something that stood the test of time like an unyielding fossil was maintaining to do lists. Just a bunch of tasks and checkboxes as a reminder of what needs to be done.
Now, before I shower praises let me address the inherent problem that happens with most to-do list apps. Most of them have tasks disappear once you mark them as complete. Now this action can be oddly satisfying at times, like wiping off specks of dust from a pristine white table. At times I add tiny tasks to be marked as complete so that I can get a faux dopamine shot of having achieved something. But my anxiety riddled brain has a way of seeing the downside of this too. Even though I’d complete 7/10 tasks, I’d still be obsessed about the 3 that are left. And that’s when my brain smashes that panic button once the day approaches its end. The joy of pen and paper is looking at those struck off tasks as a reminder that 70% of the day was effective as per this list. It’s a nitpick but it still something that gnaws at me once in a while.
Now it’s been a while that I’ve relied heavily on creating these lists in the day cause it gives a comforting feeling of control. It’s a way to combat certain anxieties, cause personally a lot of those feelings are borne out of not knowing what to do next. Lists can be an effective North Star to guide you through feelings of…* cough *…listlessness.
But having used these lists to intensely over the span of a few years as a way of effective habit building, there is one trap I often fall for: Ignoring tasks which have long been ignored for days. There will be certain tasks that will become easier to ignore the more you ignore them. Cause the brain effectively de-prioritises them as background noise and soon you’ll stop noticing it even exists. This is an effective way of rewiring that happens so you ideally don’t lose your head about everything at once. But this is the chasm where habits come to jump off and die. Cause effectively ignoring that task for days makes it all the less sacred. And this is the prime idea of a task list: Each task HAS to be sacred. Now, I don’t mean sacred with any religious connotation here. More of it being sacrosanct.
Now it’d be really exhausting to attach deep devotional meaning to mundane things such as “get milk” and “call the electrician”, just in order to raise it to some sacred level. That’s a bit of a stretch. It’s not exactly a do or die scenario that you need to get cortisol pumped for every tiny task. However there needs to be a certain level of reverence to be associated to your things to do for it to achieve a level of momentum to get done. And that comes with attaching a level of sanctity to each task.
Now as vague as that sounds, it’s just another way of saying that whatever you put up on a list needs to feel important. If it doesn’t then wrestle with the thought on why it should be before chucking it in the trash. Most of our time spent scuffling with fluctuating motivations stems from our inability to define a value for the things we do. If that sense of value is preset then it doesn’t warrant constant questioning on why it is there in the first place.
Just like how a religious person might not need to weigh on “Is there a god?” every time they would like to go to a place of worship. If there’s a preset sanctity associated then it’d have enough inherent value for you to move on beyond that. I agree, this analogy would make atheists grind their teeth in dismay, but there’s a bigger point here.
In a nutshell: We do the things we do cause we associate meaning to them. If that meaning or purpose becomes unwavering over a period of time it can slowly get integrated within us so that we don’t keep questioning why its there in the first place. And so, that is my justification to get up from the couch right now and finally go buy some milk. 😐