Praise be to the many sheets and even more little bits of paper that have brought order to my daily round.  What rest ye have given my mind, my heart.  How carelessly have I been to so quickly toss aside what one I held so dear — just because a day has passed.

Oh, how I love a good list.  Making one is part of the joy, pulling all the chaos into an order, a time-line of sorts.  Once made, a good list puts me on auto pilot (but in a good way), free to do what needs to be done, free to enjoy the tasks at hand without worrying about what I should/shouldn’t be doing.  (I know I have to work from a list today!)

About the same time I lost my watch (I’ll share that story another time), I also lost my compulsive list-making.  Why torture myself with the list of everything, leaving me at the end of the day . . . or even worse, the next morning . . . feeling like a failure  because missions were not accomplished?  Instead, I’ve implemented a variation on a theme of list-making.  Now I only make them when I feel overwhelmed and know I need to put everything to-do in front of me in chronological order.  I’m a visual person.

At the end of the night or the weekend, when I look at my list I can see all that I’ve done.  It’s not unusual to look at it with a sense of awe.  Superwoman would be proud, and I work without a Time Turner.  For those few things I wanted done but didn’t do, I realize that I am human, and it wasn’t really that important, anyway.

There are other lists lurking around here, too.  Wish lists, project lists, ideas and brainstorms.  The important part, again, is getting it out of mind; there are too many monkeys in there as it is.  If this helps bring a calm (which it does), then it’s worth it.  Experiment with this.  Of you already have a list-making habit, re-evaluate.  Does it really work for you?  Do you make enough lists?  Too many?  Do you feel accomplished at the end of your list time-frame?

As my responsibilities increase and to-do lists start to look like wish lists, I’ll try to remember my progress thus far and focus instead on my gratitude journal (my list of thanks), and I’m sure everything else will fall into place.