How Do I Do All My To-Dos?

I am not an organized person. This is not one of those self-effacing comments I make about myself where I’m expecting you guys to all jump in and be like “nooo you’re sooooo organized omg I love your organizational skills” or whatever. No. If you were to look at my Google Calendars, or my Evernote “system,” or my email inbox, you’d be like, shit, that’s fucking organized, and yes, you’d be right, but that is something I force myself to do. Like what is the equivalent of kicking and screaming when it’s your own brain that’s dragging you to do something you don’t want to do? Basically my interior monologue is consistently bitching about how, first, she doesn’t want to sit still and make a to-do list, and then secondly, how she better make a to-do list or all of this third-person-talking-to-ourselves is going to get us committed.

I started honing this really intense — some might say “absurd” but shut up — system when I started working, lol, three jobs, because that was a thing I did for awhile. At first it was a kind of normal amount of three jobs, if that’s even a reasonable statement to make?! Like, I worked a day job for a buyer at a very nice clothing store, and the hours were more or less 10am to 7pm, and then I was just starting to volunteer for WORN as the Promotions Director, and I was doing some very, very light freelance writing. So I’d get up around 6am, work out with a Jillian Michaels DVD (I KNOW I KNOW BUT LET ME FINISH), shower, work on WORN stuff from 7:30 to 9:30, go to work, come home, eat, and work on writing from like 8pm to 11pm or so. And then I did a shift at the WORN office on Saturday afternoons. And I loved it. That’s when I got into very loose to-do lists, just like “here’s what needs to get done today.”

But THEN. When I left my job at the store I replaced it with a slightly more flexible day job — as a virtual assistant for Jennifer Dziura, what’s up Jen — and that’s when having three jobs became…well, I guess more like what you would expect having three jobs to be like. Like, just constant, crushing, overwhelming amounts of Things To Do in any given day, but for the most part they were all pretty easily defined, easily completed tasks. For example: email this person. Call that person. Write this form. Finish the budget for that grant. And so on and so forth. And that’s when I was like, if I don’t force myself to pretend to be the most organized person on the face of this dumb Earth my head will explode and I will die and then none of these emails will get sent and I will be even more garbage than I currently am, a fate worse than death, duh.

So that’s when my to-do lists became My Everything and I started getting really intense about them. They were organized by date, blocks of time, and location; like, today at 12pm I’ll be at the WORN office, so here’s everything I need to do in that location. I even included all the non-work stuff like: Exercise. Eat. Shower. See Friends. And I would do it and check off the little box and that lizard part of my brain that needs constant validation would be temporarily satisfied I had proven my worth and could continue to exist on this dumb planet.

But NOW. I don’t know!! Recently I haven’t even been able to force myself to make a to-do list, and when I make them, I find I don’t even look at them, I just work and work and then I’m like huh, did I do anything that I actually wrote down this morning? And it’s sometimes yes but sometimes no. On Sundays I try and make a loose to-do list for the week, at least, but by Wednesday (i.e. right now) I am actually just like ready to set fire to my laptop anyway so I’ve completely stopped looking at it. I no longer get any satisfaction from checking off those little boxes. Obviously this could be because my job has changed so much; like, now, when I write down “deal with all emails” for a certain block of time and I do it “dealing with all emails” actually takes me about three hours and checking ONE BOX to denote THREE HOURS of work does NOTHING To satisfy my petty lizard brain. And for my freelance work, too; I’ll write down “finish first draft” and seven hours will go by and it’s done and I just want to be like, well, ticking a box doesn’t feel as good as having a first draft to file, so fuck it.

In January Jazmine’s One Big Question was all about how people get their shit done, my favorite thing to read because I’m always hoping it’ll inspire some new form of intrinsic organization in my dumb dumb lizard brain, but right now I’m really stumped!! Like: how should I be organizing myself if the to-do lists aren’t doing it for me anymore? Should I just get over it and embrace a more chaotic system, like, fuck it, as long as posts are going up and emails are responded to in a more or less timely fashion and pieces are getting filed, who cares what my to-do lists look like? What do YOU do to organize everything you have to do in a day? Also, who can find the most embarrassing thing in the screenshots of previous to-do lists I’ve posted here? “Purple mask” is pretty on-brand, I have to say.