Lists

The other day we were in the car and my friend, who is about to have surgery, brought up the concept of “check-lists” and how impressed he was the surgeon uses them during surgery.   My nephew is an airline pilot who has mentioned how important “check-lists” are in that industry.   I don’t deal much with life and death on a daily basis.  But, I am a big fan of lists.  I wouldn’t get much done without them.  My mind became a sieve when I was pregnant with my first and the holes have only gotten bigger over the years.

Those little scrap of papers I make tend to keep me focused, and when I don’t have a list I tend to aimlessly do things without staying on task.  If I didn’t actually make a note to try to blog, I would completely forget that I should do it more often.  I notice my last post was ten days ago, but I have a very good excuse for not blogging.

On Saturday, I hosted a chamber music event at my house as a fundraiser for my son’s school, Three Cedars Waldorf School.  We are blessed with an amazing amount of talent there–parents, faculty and friends–who combine their efforts to bring a high-quality performance every time.  My lists last week were epic, and I even used word to type them up and then printed them.  They included the food prep, the party prep (chair-rental, moving furniture, cleaning lists) and miscellaneous life stuff that had to happen even though I was having a party.  Blogging was not on my list.  Notice lack of blog posts last week–though I did get something up for my knitting blog.

Not everything I do gets put on my list every day, but there have been days when I start my list with “Wake Up”  and “Get out of Bed” which are followed by “Get Dressed” and every other daily minutiae just to get myself through the day.

Today’s list is rather short by comparison.

• Work out
• Catch up on Email
• Write a blog post
  
• Figure out next month’s book to read for book group
• Get to the Lighting store (in Wallingford) and pick up repaired lights (tried to do this last week, but it was left undone)
• Take Emma’s shoe back to Fluevog  (Third trip? yeah, you’d expect better from a Fluevog!)
• Pick up an after school snack for Emma
• Pick up Emma and drive her to violin
• Move furniture back into place

What’s sort of funny is that I started this blog with three things on my mental list.  As I wrote it down, I added everything else as I remembered various things I ought to get done.  Oh, well.  It’s still short in comparison to some days.