WHITING: On Post-Its, golfballs and balanced priorities

The following is true with everyone, which makes this column entirely un-unique and relatively uninteresting but pretty relevant, so here goes nothing:

I have measured my life in undone to-do lists.

My father must have foreseen that I’d be a big “I need to write that down”-er when, eight years ago, he bought me the endless supply of personalized sticky notes I’m still using today. My Post-It habit is a bit compulsive. And very cluttering — my windowsill, my books, my whole life are littered in them. But those colored squares of paper are a source of fabricated order and constancy in an otherwise chaotic life. It’s as if, I jot to-do’s, therefore I am.

Only not. Because I jot so much that my response is not to mobilize and do it all, but to sink as far as I can into my thin mattress pad and not do anything. We have no fall break, and I’m a bit overwhelmed and would very much like a personal secretary. #pathetic

To change things up, I’ve tried writing memos on my hand — I sport a tattoo of pressing demands that make my life look busy and exciting and my dinner invitation refusals seem legitimate. But it turns out that the immediacy with which you should attend to temporary skin squiggles is only slightly more effective at promoting action. Post-Its get stuck to the wall and forgotten, yes, but hands get washed and whatever was written there forever vanishes into the abyss that is my mind when its thoughts are not written down.

This is bad. If list-making signifies an aspiration to get things done but is coupled with a flawed lack of resolve to make it happen, I don’t know why I bother at all. I want to do too many things, and telling myself to prioritize is no help. There’s that old maxim about living like you’re dying, but I promise you, if I knew I was going to die tomorrow, I would not pay bills or clean the toilet. I’d go out as much as possible and turn in my essays late.

Actually, this is kind of the case. As these are uncertain times — I graduate soon, so life as I know it is ending — “Eat veggies in fridge before they mold” is always ignored in the face of drunken noodles, and “email Advising Office” is completely overridden by a dinner date. Maybe this is bad prioritizing, (you’d think I’d mobilize for the next stage of existence) or maybe this is the prioritization of my subconscious knowledge that lists are only guidelines (?). I am starting to sense, as I stare at a pile of Anne Whiting–brand sticky notes which with equal urgency demand to-dos like “organize under bed” and “update resume,” that there is some Great Chain of To-Do’s Pope forgot to mention that would be very helpful to my studies.

There’s an age-old, slightly pertinent demonstration that’s been circulating the web lately: If you take a jar and fill it with golfballs, it will look full. But it won’t be, because if you pour pebbles into the jar, you will find that there is space between the rocks. Once again, it will look full. But if you continue by pouring sand into the jar, you will find that there is space for it, too, between the pebbles.

Now the jar will look completely full. But were you to open two beers and pour them into the jar, they too would seep into the sand, no problem.

The jar is a metaphor. It is your life. The golfballs are the important things. Things like your family, your friends, your passions. If there were nothing else in the jar, it would be full. Pebbles are other things, like job applications and apartments. The sand is everything else. And you can’t put the sand in the jar first because there will be no room for the golf balls.

I guess the same goes for the to-do-listed life. If we spend all our time and energy on to-dos like “update LinkedIn account” and “organize closet,” we won’t have time for the big ones like, “James in town” and “Tibby’s birthday party.”

Though I guess LinkedIn is somewhat important.

I need to work on the balance between planning and living in the moment. Lists encourage productivity and performance, which is generally a good thing. But pick and choose what’s most important to accomplish. There will always be dishes to do. Call your grandmother.

Most of my to-do’s get done eventually, after a week or two of procrastination. Maybe the most important thing we learn in college is that the perfection of getting it all done is overrated. We certainly learn (or try to learn) to discern tasks and make decisions. We’re lucky for that. Too many Stickies is a luxury. What, after all, does the task-less existence amount to? Having things to do proves we’re alive.

So yeah. I wish this piece was more insightful, but of course I’ve got other things on the agenda. I’m in Baltimore visiting my sister when I also need to be in Mugar studying for a reading quiz or applying to grad school. Oh well. Moral of the story: work on the pebbles but remember the golf balls. And don’t forget that in your jar, you can find room for another beer with friends.

Anne Whiting is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences and a Fall 2012 columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at aew@bu.edu.