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What if your to-do list was a menu?
You only choose what you want to do.
That was today’s takeaway from Oliver Burkman’s Meditations for Mortals.
It was an intriguing idea as someone with an unhealthy obsession with making the perfect system to manage my to-do list. Instead of being a list of things I should do but know I’ll most likely fail to complete, it’s a menu of choices.
It’s like one of those magical moments of clarity. Just that small shift in mindset was liberating. I’ve not been well, and as part of honouring my balance month, I’ve taken it easy the last two days. But that meant that my to-do list was playing on my mind.
Rather than worrying about it, I let the day flow. I got into my writing and kept going until I managed to escape it. I’m now spending the next hour or so working on those little tasks that niggle and can become a problem if I don’t deal with them.
This is the list of finishing tasks. I have emails to send, messages to reply to and some small admin tasks. Instead of letting them roll over to tomorrow, I deal with them one after the other until they’re done.
It’s an extension of my process of asking myself:
“What is the most important thing I can do now?” And then do it.