To do lists

Today my to do list started out with 22 items on it. It's now almost the end of the day and it's down to...20. That's just 2 things I've managed to put a happy little tick next to. And that wasn't for lack of effort. I just have so many awfully enormous things I have to do.

Which means that this evening, instead of watching trash on TV while guzzling some wine, I have to work. This is part of the deep, deep joy of working from home and for yourself. There is no off button. (It's not helped by the fact that I have to cut short my working day at 2.30 to fetch children, play in the park, remove peed on pants, go to swimming lessons, remove clinging child from leg, race starving children home, make supper, clean up and bath kids - none of that was on my to do list.)

I'm coming to the realisation that there are some things on my list that will never get ticked off. They simply get pushed further and further down until they start to become abbreviated and abridged and shortened unitl I can barely understand what the original task was so decide, 'sod it'. The next time I write a new to do list, it gets left off. Never crossed out. Because somewhere in my insane brain I think that I might one day go back to that original to do list and actually do the thing. sigh.

What's more, I NEVER throw away my old notebooks with centuries worth of to do lists in them because I might one day need them. I also tend to have a very erratic way of working (which really annoys me) so instead of writing important things down in a suitable place, I scrawl them on the corners of pages or upside down or in the middle of a doodle. It's usually something incredibly important, like the telephone number of the most important BBC journalist ever, but still, instead of typing it into my contacts database (which itself is in a fairly dismal state), I somehow think that the back of an coffee stained envelope will be better. You'd think I'd then lose this envelope (which sometimes I do) but usually, I just shove the envelope in between to do lists. And despite always having to hunt through reams of old note books to retrieve the telephone number on several occassions, I still fail to add it to my contacts list.

I should probably add 'type important number into contacts database' to my to do list ... and come to think of it 'sort out contacts database'. But both would definitely become those items that get abridged and shortened etc until they falls off the list. So really, it's an exercise in futility. I might as well just accept my shortcomings and inability to complete to do lists.

But I guess if I'm going to get even close to ticking off a few more things on today's epic list, I'd better sign off. Wish me luck.