A list a day...

... keeps trouble away.

Do you love to-do lists as much as I do? All the things you need / want / wish to do in order. It's magical. They remind me a bit of the pensieve of Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter novels. Just take a thought out of your head and store it somewhere safe. To lighten your head a bit. Most of my lists do work in exactly this way. I am a cluttered mind and need some extra-storage from time to time. What am I saying? All the time! My desk is always loaded with to-do-lists. On a regular basis they are collected, put on one new list and thrown away.

Sasha Cagen is the best known to-do-listologist. Her blog is full of lists which reveal so much about their writers. (http://www.todolistblog.com/) Lists can be a precise diary of what we did, what we are planning to do and – maybe most often – of what we fail to do. There are a lot of items I have had on my lists for ages. At work these often are tasks that I do not particularly like, e.g. calculations or anything else involving maths and excel. Those two are my arch enemies, I try to hide from them as good as I can. And I am an expert at procrastination, in private those things, wandering on every list are either also involving maths (like figuring out a private form of pension) or take some effort or organizing (like taking part in a burlesque seminar, or learning Italian – I started this, though. Yay for me!) I even have an app on my phone called “do it

"Do it tomorrow"-app

tomorrow”, created for procrastinators like me. Here I write down every single thing I want to remember, it is my virtual knot in a tissue (is that an international habit? In German culture you used to do that if you had something to remember.) Sometimes stuff I have to do for work pop into my head in the middle of the night. And while I used to lie awake and think about it, nowadays I just write it down into my phone and get to it in the morning. (Also I use it to write down every musician or song I hear somewhere and want to check out later on spotify. Great, because now I never feel like I am missing something that might be as life-changing as a favourite new song or singer.)

I love crossing out items on to-do lists. I always make sure to write down even tiny tasks, just to make sure I have short-term successes. Fooling oneself and yet it works pretty well. (The above mentioned app actually has this feature. You can virtually cross out your tasks, great!)

My hitlist of lists (I just love lists):

1. work to-dos (always several at the same time)

2. shopping lists (handy to keep you from buying half the supermarket)

3. pack-list for holidays (reusable)

4. invitation lists (sometimes virtual on facebook, sometimes on paper)

5. goals (usually appears in January)

There is a special kind of list I rarely make, which is a “grateful-for-list”. Psychologists say that these kinds of lists instantly make you feel better, because they help you to focus on great stuff happening in your life. So I decided it is time I write a “grateful-for-list” and here it is:

Things I am grateful for:

1. my smart, funny and loving boyfriend

2. friends

3. family (they have always been there for me which I cannot appreciate enough, knowing they are there feels like a safety net to me)

4. health (apart from my migraines I am a pretty healthy lass)

5. job ( I am doing what I like and am as free as a bird doing it. Plus I love the creative atmosphere of working at university.)

6. DIY (the whole movement tends to give me some hope that mankind is not completely lost plus: it is fun!)
7. Nature (making me feel tiny and grateful everyday. The power a beautiful sunrise or a clearblue sky have over people is magical.)

8. Internet (it might be weird that I am grateful for the internet, but my life would be so different without it. There is so many people in my life I wouldn't have met, including my better half (we met on a party, organised in the net, by couchsurfers, also something I am grateful for) and also detecting new hobbies via the net is a great experience, like blogging or knitting, for example.
9. choices (I did the right thing, studying media science, chose the right job, chose the right place to be with great people, alhtough this seems to be a bit of a repetition)

I bet there are loads of things I have forgotten or I can write down in future. Things I am grateful for might change through time as well. we will see....

Make a list and you will see, you feel better the instant you are finished with it.