The Upside of To-Do Lists

I arrive each morning at Starbucks with a small memo book in hand. Then, while drinking my grande half-caf, I read three daily newspapers and jot down the titles of books to read and stuff to write about. If a workshop is looming, my reading may inspire new writing exercises, which also go in the memo book.

Those two or three or four pages of notes then lead to what I plan to do that day, including people to contact, ball games to watch or listen to, and what to pick up at my favorite Mexican market. That all goes in the book, too.

And so begins the day’s to-do list.

I’m not sure how many decades ago I started each day with a to-do list, though it became an indispensible practice once I started teaching college writing in the mid-‘80s. There was no way I was going to enter a classroom without an agenda or to-do list, my set of goals for the next 50 minutes.

Whatever you call them, agendas or to-do lists anchor me. They give me safe crossing through the day, providing the illusion that I am in control of what’s going to happen. So if getting mugged or run over by an SUV or spilling coffee all over myself isn’t on that list, it won’t happen. Right?

This all came to mind while reading “Baby Boomers Reach the End of Their To-Do List,” by Patricia Hampl.* It was published in the New York Times on April 15, and, of course, duly noted in my indispensible memo book.

In the piece, Hampl contrasts striving—as epitomized by to-do lists—with serenity, though for me it’s the list that leads to serenity: I make the day’s goals, I achieve them, I am serene. And should I not reach one of those goals? Easy, it goes on the next day’s to-do list.

Then nearing the end of her essay, Hampl quotes one of my favorite poets, Walt Whitman, as an example of how we can do the opposite of striving:

Waste the day. That’s what that great American lounger Whitman did. “I loaf and invite my soul,” he wrote. “I lean and loaf at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.”

But here’s what I think: Whitman wrote that after hours, maybe days, spent reading, walking, keenly observing the world around him, probably taking notes, and then writing.

And re-writing. 

Whitman simply offered the illusion that the loafing and the idle observing spilled out effortlessly onto the page. The opposite is true, of course. Though he entered the creative chaos of writing not knowing where it would lead him, once there he was in precise control of words and sentences that have lasted over one hundred years.

Control, illusion, and creative chaos: They all begin with my to-do list.

*https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/14/opinion/sunday/baby-boomers-to-do-list.html