Useless Lists

The more I want to be organized and efficient, -- I create lists of things to do and I try to keep to them, -- the more I have the feeling that my days pass too fast and I am not able to keep track of them. Maybe the mistake is that I don’t put time limits for each activity, or maybe I have too many things on the list. Often times something unexpected takes up enough of my time to mess up the daily schedule. Whichever the reason, in the evening it pains me to realize I haven’t done much of what I had planned. 

My routine is as follows: in the morning, when I wake up, I make myself a cup of coffee and I drink it in front of my agenda, organizing my day. I have certain activities that I do every day, and other activities that I only do in some days of the week. By the time I finish the list (5 minutes), I still have coffee left in my cup, so I continue with reading the news on the internet. This is part of my waking up process, so it is not included in the daily list.

Usually I am disciplined enough to start as planned and go on for hours as planned. Still, in the evening I look back on the day, puzzled. I can not remember how it went by and I don’t understand why I can only check half of my list.

So, in desperation, I decided to use a trick as a safety net. My trick is to use Google Calendar to write everything I do and how long it took to do it, after I’ve done it and then compare that with the list I create in the morning. This way, I hope to be able to find out how my days sneak out on me and fix that.