My mother is probably one of the most devoted to-do list fans. Unfortunately, she's become a slave to the list. She agonizes over not being able to put a check mark on the tasks she hopes to do each day.
Last Saturday, right after lunch, my father finally pointed out this fact. "Honey," he told her, "you spend way too much time making that list. You're beginning to scare me."
I didn't stick around to find out what happened after that. (But I was quite relieved when my father called the next day to report that he and my mother were still sharing the same roof.)
In an article "Is the To-Do List Doing You In?," Kathleen McGowan, explains my mother's to-do list addiction: "Plenty of us create a to-do list to address feelings of being overwhelmed, but we rarely use these tools to their best effect. They wind up being guilt-provoking reminders of the fact that we're 'overcommitted' and losing control of our priorities."
Often, the people who have such detailed lists turn out to be "closet procrastinators."
"Too often, the list is seen as the 'accomplishment' for the day, reducing the immediate guilt of not working on the tasks at hand by investing energy in the list," observes procrastination researcher Dr. Timothy Pychyl, a professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.
So what's the first step to kicking one's procrastination problem?
Dr. Bill Knaus, author of The Procrastination Workbook, offers these tips:
1. Learn to prioritize.
Don't get bogged down by tasks that could wait. Alphabetizing your DVD collection isn't such a good idea when you have a leaky water pipe to fix.
2. Do it ASAP.
To borrow a popular tagline from a sports apparel ad: Just do it. Don't make excuses to dawdle.
3. Resist "procrastination thinking."
Don't get distracted by things that suddenly come up. So, when a friend invites you to go on a road trip on the day you're supposed to get a lot of writing done, you should resist the urge to use the romanticized adage, "Carpe diem," to justify ditching your responsibilities.
As for my mother, I'd like to tell her that she doesn't really need to feel guilty about not doing that much anymore. Her to-do lists were only somewhat useful when she had to manage a household that had six kids, five or so hamsters, and a couple of dogs.
It's time to take it easy, Mom. You've earned the right to procrastinate.
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