To Do or not To Do

It has already been four months since I started my new postdoc in Tokyo. I have been little a bit of blog-blocked, suffering from a blogger’s type of writer’s block, so as usual I can only apologize for being silent for so many weeks.

Those last months were clearly defined by my difficult relationship with the To Do list.

Let me start by saying that I am a huge fan of “To Do” lists. Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, work, home, shopping, what not…

Before moving to this new job, I treated my “November To Do” list as a parking place for all ideas that I had and all private and work projects that I did not want to start until my head was clear and until I moved to Tokyo. I had kept this list since May or June of the previous year, when I decided I “cannot take it any more” and that I was moving out and leaving my postdoc in the rural university in western Japan.

So I have started “saving” and writing down tasks To Do “after I move to Tokyo” and I have accumulated quite a long list of tasks even before moving. Many of the tasks were my wishful thinking about how my life would be better here and how much more free I would be to pursue whatever it wanted.

In Autumn all sort of mundane, mind-bogging bureaucratic projects were added to the list. Apply for the visa (not such a simple project, with many papers to get), sort out every day living business, register as a foreigner in the new city, get health insurance, go to a conference two weeks into the new job (if the visa application is submitted within the first week), discuss Christmas holidays dates with the new advisor, plan itinerary, find and buy affordable tickets.

The list seemed endless and as soon as I moved here I started adding more and more things to the November list: get books to read, learn Japanese, talk to my husband daily on internet, the Christmas preparations, cards, presents, ect. It became chaotic, things were repeated in several places, I kept moving the most urgent tasks to the top of the list, but soon the top section alone was about three A4 pages of tasks.

November and early December had been like a merry-go-round. The more things I crossed off the list, the more things I was putting on it. It felt like I was ploughing through the list, and I could not see the end. I also started completely neglecting my life support systems: healthy eating, exercise, organized home. I stopped logging the food I eat, and lost control of whatever fuel I put into my body. Moving here all on my own was about too much for me to handle.

The problem with the list was that I kept it all in one file, and as it grew longer and longer it stopped being manageable. At one point in December I spend a big chunk of time and got the list organized according to GTD* principles. At that point it felt like I had most of my ideas and life projects captured there and that I had a great system for weekly and monthly planning of my projects and I finally felt organized!**

But as the life was speeding up before Christmas and the inbox kept growing bigger and bigger, and there was not enough time to review, the need to scroll up and down, and look for things in different places, soon made managing the list quite impossible.

In January I had more of happy-go-lucky period, where I ignored the most of the task on my twenty pages long list and just focused on the day-to-day survival. This resulted in the lack of focus at work and no moving forward on the new projects I am starting. Then my husband visited me for ten days, which meant even less focus at work, and on the last day of his stay I had tripped on the stairs at work and could not walk without crutches for the next two weeks.

Mid-February I have discovered a nice software tool*** for managing my To Do list. In the first few days I treated it as an inbox for all the ideas running around my head that I could not quite fit into my linear form of my now messy twenty pages To Do file.

After two weeks of testing the new software I have completed 67 tasks and I have got 184 tasks To Do on my list. And this is even before I have completed the transfer of the majority of the longer term (important and high priority) projects and their associated tasks from my twenty pages linear To Do file.

Talk about feeling overwhelmed! It feels like I am imprisoned by the To Do list!

* GTD is “Getting Things Done”, a book by David Allen, and a system of organizing your tasks and life that they become easy, manageable and even pleasurable.

** I am not a naturally organized person, I am quite the opposite: my personality is quite spontaneous and chaotic and I take the measures like organizing a planning system to prevent the ever growing chaos that my life becomes when I am myself. I guess this is a part of growing up and of mature pursuing of complex and long-term goals that demand a lot of delayed-gratification. My room is still a chaos though, and I am wondering when I am going to handle all that unpacking and tidying that is needed to be done.

*** I work on a Mac and the software is called The Hit List (still in beta version and free, once it is finished it will be paid-for). I absolutely love it!