To Do Or Not To Do (Lists, That Is)

Do you know what I realized tonight? I volunteered at the December PTO meeting to chair and investigate doing a school supply program for Mister Man's school (no, they don't do one today). I forgot about that until now, and there's a meeting in a little over a week.

Any guesses what I'll be doing in the small bit of free time between eating lunch and heading to Mister Man's school to pick him up for his speech group? How did this happen?

Well, I know how it happened.

Right now, I sit with a to do list a mile long. Granted, it's only a mental to do list, as I haven't yet had the fortitude to actually write it down and memorialize what I need to do. Part of that is paralysis by the thought of so much, and part of it is sheer laziness, knowing I can get done the most critical bits based on what I've got in my head.

And that new commitment of looking into developing a school supply program? It slipped my mind because ... because it was the holidays and it happened on a Friday and I had gone downtown to visit my friend's twins immediately upon the conclusion of the meeting and well lots of reasons, none really good.

Do I think this is the only thing that's slipped my mind? Not even close. I watched Melisa put together a rather impressive list of goals for a twelve day period, and I was jealous. So many of the items on her list are the ones on my list, too, but I haven't had the "time" to do them.

To be honest, she's just as busy or busier than I am, yet she didn't find the time, she made the time. And she remembered what she had to do because she wrote put her to do list on a calendar online so she received reminders and knew exactly what she had to do. I used to do that - albeit on my pretty whiteboard that is currently laying under two Christmas decorations on my cats' condo.

That doesn't help me much.

As soon as I finish this post (really, I mean it!), I'm picking up that whiteboard and erasing all the tasks I completed a month ago, the last time I used it. I'm going to divide it into sections of tomorrow, this week, and future. And I'm going to start writing down what I need to do.

The hardest things for me when it comes to writing to do lists are breaking down the tasks into small enough bites and properly assigning time to each task.

If I write down that I need to "Provide proposal for School Supply program" that's a little overwhelming. There are so many things I need to do before I get to that point from identifying companies to working with teachers to ID their school supply lists to requesting quotes from various companies and way more. Those are the tasks I need to put into my to do list. Simply sending teachers an email alerting them to what we're looking to do and asking if last year's school supply lists are a good start is manageable. In fact, I might even do that tonight.

I'll also get going on a to do list kick and then start failing with my daily to dos. Instead of crossing off the seven items, I only completed three. Being more realistic in figuring out what I can do is critical to ensuring that I don't begin to feel like I'm drowning in seaweed. I think I'll actually start doing weekly to do lists rather than daily. That way if I can't get something done in a particular day because something came up (like yesterday when I tried to drop my ring off at the jeweler to be fixed only to pull into the parking lot and discover he's closed on Mondays), it isn't a big deal.

So if you'll excuse me, I have a to do list to create. But hey - if anyone has any experience with school supply programs, I'll happily take some advice!

Giveaways:
Win one of two copies of Avatar in Blu-Ray here

In the interest of full disclosure, I received a copy of Take the Cake by M.F. Chapman as a part of the book club From Left to Write. There was no compensation involved, and our purpose is to write a post inspired by the book versus doing a traditional book review.