What Do You Get To Do?

Hello Human

Fear not. I am not about to muse in Shakespearean language.

What’s on my mind though is my ‘to do’ list. It’s long. Most of the time it’s too long, and at times it feels like a dead weight dragging behind me. Inhibiting rather than enabling progress. At other times it is quite useful and I get a rush ticking things off as ‘done’.

Whether you tick things off your to do list or cross them off it, can you relate? Does your to do list inhibit you or enable you? How do you go prioritising your list? How good are you at breaking the big projects and tasks down into smaller manageable pieces?

Before I get stuck into the ‘to do list’ topic a little more let me share this with you.?

I went in search of the answer to this question: Why do we humans make lists? I found Italian novelist Umberto Eco, who says:

“The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order -- not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogues, through collections in museums and through encyclopaedias and dictionaries. We also have completely practical lists -- the shopping list, the will, the menu -- that are also cultural achievements in their own right.”

So there must be something hard wired in us as human ‘beings’ to create lists.??

“Lists help us to make sense of the world around us.”

“We pack all the madness and ambiguity of life into a structured form

of writing.”

Let me pause here on the ‘being’ in human beings for a minute. I am all about ‘being’, rather than just doing. After all we are human beings not human doings, right??

With that said, and with my new found insight into us humans as list makers, maybe there’s something here about us needing lists - bringing order to the chaos - to actually function properly as human beings.

If you’ve stayed with me to this point, let me clarify, in a list, where I am at in this mess.

1. We are first and foremost human beings, not human doings.

2. We are hardwired to make lists, to help make sense of the world around us.

3. The lists we make should cut through procrastination and assist productivity (however you define productivity - weekly shopping or splitting the atom, no matter)

4. The lists we make should help and enable us, not overwhelm and weigh us down.

To help myself combat the overwhelm and weight here I started playing around with the name of my list. There’s work stuff to do, family stuff to do, home stuff to do, business stuff to do. Well done Mark, one ‘to do’ list is now four ‘to do’ lists!

Light bulb moment…

HAVE to do, or WANT to do, or GET to do.

Have to do - I still have four lists.

Want to do - I went from four down to one. Progress, but it was still long.?

All the things I ‘want to do’ isn’t really a very long bridge from all the things I ‘have to do’. I did manage to cull a bunch of stuff I just don’t want to do though.

Get to do. Get to do. Get to do… I think I’m onto something.

I work in a world where I am helping humans every day to pause, breathe, think and reframe.?

So I’m reframing my ‘to do’ list. Shaking off the ‘have to do’ element and pushing beyond the ‘want to do’ element. Putting a positive perspective on the to do list and framing it as the list of things I ‘get to do’.

Liberating right?

Feel free to try it. Last thing at night or first thing in the morning, or sometime in between, blank sheet of paper and pen, or new document and clear keyboard:?

The things I GET to do today (or tomorrow) are….

Keep it brief. It’s a mindset shift away from the overwhelm and weight of ‘have to do’, wiring in a little thanks and gratitude as a human being for those things that you ‘get to do’ today.

Let me finish with a little light relief from the late and great Johnny Cash. It’s a fairly well known story about his ‘to do’ list. Here it is.

Now, if he were alive and half interested in reading my muse and taking on my key message, I reckon he’d be able to trim his ‘to do list’ down into this ‘get to do list’ and it’d be a pretty good day.

1.Kiss June

2. Eat

3. Go see Mama

4. Practice Piano

Here’s the thing though, the fact that Johnny Cash would also ‘get to’ pee and cough, as minor as those things might be, would also mean he’d ‘get to’ live another day.?

Mindset shift, appreciate the, otherwise taken for granted, small things in life as a human being.

What do you ‘get to do’ today??

Go well?Human.