WillWybrow.com

This past week, I’ve been (re)discovering the power of a well-structured to-do list.

I always get a surge of motivation just before bed time. I look back on my whole day, which has usually been wasted just trying to find little things to do on the internet to while away the obscene amount of free time I have, and wish I’d done something more productive. This leads to a regular occurrence, the ten minute long future-planning sequence where I’ll think fondly about how different things will be in the future, a habit that started off even before the whole deal with the altercation and the trial that between them have consumed my life this year.

Anyway, aside from a lot of far-off hopes and aspirations that take a form similar to New Year’s Resolutions (and have as much impact), I’ll also come up with some things to do in the immediate future. I might think of something I’ll need to go out and buy, something of mine that needs finding from my scattered and unsorted possessions or perhaps someone who needs to be emailed or phoned (usually before a specific time). More often than not, when I wake up in the morning, I’ll have forgotten, and failing that, I’ll be too apathetic to get it done. And occasionally I’ll oversleep and fail by running out of time in the day.

Enter the humble, hand-written to-do list! Harnessing my nightly dose of motivation when it strikes, I can put down a list of jobs to do the following day. So I tried it for a few days this week. I’ve had lots of little things to take care of as well as one big ongoing task that has earned me money for the two or three Christmas presents I am actually buying this year (it’s not real employment, more on jobs later). Building a list before I go to bed at night gives me a plan for the day, and it is easier to follow the plan than it is to remember all the things I’ve got to do and decide by ear which ones I should pay attention to. It’s also easier than mindlessly bumming around the house filling my face from the fridge while watching TV and refreshing Facebook. Just following the list requires the least mental effort, so that’s what I do. Having motivation strike just before going to bed is useless without being able to carry the motivation over to the next day with a hard plan.

Aside from letting me practise my film title parodies by naming each list as a sequel to its predecessor, having these lists means I have a reason to get out of bed in the mornings. Where, without a plan, I might optimistically aim for a 10am morning, this would consistently become noon or later as I’d stagger out of bed in that state of tiredness that comes from having too much sleep (which I think everyone gets?). If I ever had an ambitious attempt at getting even earlier (due to the reasoning that if a 10am alarm means I get up at 12pm, to get up at 10 I should set the alarm for 8), I ran the risk of not hearing my new phone’s pathetic attempt at an alarm sound or turning it off in my sleep and snoozing right on through.

Well, some of you may know that I’ve had a couple of job interviews this week. The first was at 4:30pm, so not particularly straining on my undisciplined lifestyle, but the second (same place, different day) was in the morning. Not wanting to run the risk of not hearing my alarm go off, I fished out my proper alarm clock, packed away in whichever box it came back from university in, way back in June. Not only is this alarm louder, it is less forgiving with the snooze button, only giving me four minutes of snoozing before piping up again with an even more annoying bleep each time. What’s more, it projects the time on the wall, which is pretty cool. So, thusly armed, I was able to make it to my interview on time. Good thing, too, because I did really well in this second interview, whereas I’d not done nearly as well in the first one.

One of the additional benefits to having this new alarm clock was that, in conjunction with my deferred motivation tactic of penning out some to-do lists, I could now reliably get up at a normal person’s time of morning. I was hitting the 7s and 8s in the morning that I’d almsot forgotten existed.

One other thing I should mention about the faithful handwritten list is the satisfying ability to cross things off it. What’s nice about the analogue system of pen and paper is that you can cross an item off really vigorously when you complete a tough task. It validates and amplifies any sense of accomplishment you get after doing a job to be able to scrawl a huge tick across the words.

So now I am back in practice with regard to motivation and hitting the early mornings, even when still not going to bed until 2 or 3am. What use is that especially to a man whose only time is free time? Not much, you might think. That is, until you find out that nailing the second interview for that job seemed to counterbalance the less successful first interview and has secured me the job title of ‘junior engineer’ at an electronics company. That’s right, your favourite layabout Facebook-jockey, Will Wybrow, is going to be a productive member of society again, and you can attribute it all to to-do lists.

The sequel to the original list, which I had titled Shit to Do.

The third in the series was a flop.

Set years in the future, Shit to Do 4.0 was created with a contemporary theme to appeal to the shifting demographic its predecessors couldn’t ever target.