What A To-Do About Nothing
by Rachel Ragg
Marie Claire magazine happened to catch my eye when I was (ahem) working this morning.
To-do lists! it said. What does your relationship with your list say about you?
The Marie Claire staff are all evidently very exciting people. Their to-do lists involve waxing, gyms, spray tans, pedicures, holidays and Oyster cards (I know what most of these things are, because I’ve read about them in newspapers).
Hmm, I think. I have a feeling that I don’t quite measure up to Marie Claire standards. Here is my current list:
Find lost train tickets.
Uncancel accidentally cancelled direct debit.
Post card that I wrote a month ago.
Return overdue library books (still in pile from the start of the school summer holidays, crowned by the council’s letter warning me that I will be locked up if I don’t return said books ASAP).
Sell old stuff on eBay (so I do have something in common with the Marie Claire crew after all!)
Watch daughter at cross country on 21st September (um … methinks I might have missed that one).
I suspect that my to-do list says simply that I need to write fewer lists and be more organised (and that I have an unspeakably dull life).
But what does your to-do list say about you?
Nice to know I’m not the only one with exciting things on my to-do list
I don’t expect the Marie Claire peeps have ‘wash labrador’ on their list, it doesn’t usually go well with a manicure and a spray tan.
I have to admit, I gave up on to-do lists when I found myself starting new lists and adding items that referred me to complete all those things, as well as the list from 11th Oct, 17th Oct…
Funnily enough, there wasn’t a labrador in sight. But you have reminded me to add ‘buy hay bale’ to my thrilling to-do list!
I’m a maverick, and I don’t have lists. I just ‘do’. If I forget to buy some milk, then hey! It’s just one of the spices of life.
Marie Claire, how’d you like THEM apples?
But the thing is: you are not a woman. So you are presumably disqualified from having a relationship with a to-do list (if MC is to be believed, anyway…)
You need to get out a bit more. Take me, for instance. On my week-end to do list was to finish emptying 45 sacks of rotted horse poo over my borders. To take a look at my overdue tax return. To buy more cat food. To sew the hole in the crotch of my son’s new onesie. Look, leant and live my dear!!
I’m afraid the onesie has sidetracked me from the horse poo. A onesie? That is the height of fashion, according to the Daily Mail…
My to do list has been the same for about a year – it includes tidying the papers in everysingle room in the house – they each could have their own to do list, write new chapters (also on the same old list), and the same old stuff every day gets in the same old way! BTW it’s only a mental one, coz the written ones are among the papers somewhere!
That did make me laugh. Your house sounds like mine!
“…read about them in newspapers” made me laugh. I so often feel that about life. Who are these glamorous people whose existence is so alien to mine?
I don’t know – but I am sure I will be glamorous in my next life!