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When you’re building a lifestyle, there are SO many details that need to be handled, SO many decisions to make, and SO many opportunities to completely forget an important item or an impending deadline. Not to mention the special kind of irritation that comes with schlepping up and down the Home Depot aisles desperately trying to remember what the heck was the fourth thing you came for!
So, as part of simplifying our lives at TRR, we do lists. Willie tends to write short little item lists intended for an individual outing to an individual store. His lists are small enough to put on a Post It and be forgotten in his jeans pocket. (More than once, I’ve seen him combing through a succession of notes looking for the list he wrote for that store.)
Ms. Type A, on the other hand, has always taken her lists ver-r-r-y seriously. Yes, there are small lists in an app on my phone for when I’ve got a Costco or Sam’s Club run coming up, but on a day-to day basis, my To Do list is on an old-fashioned steno pad. My method actually came from a “stress busters” class I took years ago. We were encouraged to make a list, but we were not allowed to check off completed tasks. Instead, the tasks were to be colored in with bright highlighters. Your eyes take in a cheerful pattern of colors, with the occasional colorless line here and there representing incomplete tasks. Somehow, our amygdala (emotional control center of the brain) is less “offended” by the colorless lines representing the incomplete tasks, than it is when we see open spaces in a line of checkmarks. ( I have no idea why this is, but it works for me.) We were also taught to transfer incomplete tasks to the next page and start again the next day.
Pretty simple, huh? For those of you wondering if I actually carry around something as awkward as a steno pad … While I do come from the generation that carried around leather bound, overstuffed planners, I have, in fact, evolved. If there are things on the list I will need while I’m out, I do what any modern woman does. I take a picture of my list with my phone!