The Happiness of a To-Do List - Respect Food Roles

Watch and to-do list on smartphone Have you been listening to the Gretchen Rubin podcast, “Happier”? Whyever not? I keep pushing it!

So, just in case you missed my earlier nagging, Rubin, the author of three wonderful books, teamed up with her sister about a year and a half ago to do a podcast. Liz is a TV writer and producer in LA, Gretchen lives in New York City, and they discuss their lives, take listener questions, give a “happiness hack,” and award a happiness demerit and gold star each week. It’s fun and light but always has something in it to make me think.

While I would like to be more like Gretchen, who is a classic Upholder (one of the Four Tendencies she’s developed), that is, someone who is incredibly disciplined and easily meets expectations both from herself and from others, I am really like Liz, an Obliger, who will kill herself to meet others’ expectations but has a hard time meeting her own. In fact, my husband I are both Obligers, and we have both struggled to put accountability structures into our lives. One of the secrets to a happy, productive life is learning to work with your tendency, not against it.

I am also like Liz in that I resist making lists, writing things down, setting a schedule. I say, as she does in this week’s episode, that I can remember things, that I have a good memory, that I carry my to-do list around in my head. In reality, though, this system is very fallible. So I wrote in Monday’s post about my failure last Saturday to adequately plan for the timing of the casseroles I made for the Cherry Creek Chorale retreat breakfast. I didn’t sit down Friday night and figure out when exactly they had to go in the oven and so exactly when I needed to get up. I figured I’d get up about 5:00 since I almost always wake up by then, but it was later than that when I straggled into the kitchen. Not the biggest tragedy in the world that one set of casseroles wasn’t done properly, but a totally avoidable mistake nonetheless.

So I’ve been trying to form the habit of using a to-do list tool called Swipesapp. It’s kind of cute, it’s fun to use, and the basic version is free. It can be synched up with Evernote, which is another wonderful free tool that gives you the capability of organizing your notes and materials into digital notebooks. I’m finding it very helpful as I gather information on various topics I plan to write about. Right now I’m working on writing a short e-book/Kindle single about the whole Benghazi episode. I hope to have that in some sort of shape by the next week or two, so watch for it over on the “Personal and Political” page. A fascinating and tragic story.

Back to SwipesApp. (Be sure you include the “app” part and don’t just google “swipes” or you’ll start getting ads for cleansing cloths. Honestly! I need to figure out how to turn those ads off.) I’ve set up my list of daily tasks to repeat every day and made (well, am trying to make) my to-do list a part of my morning routine. Coffee, Bible study, prayer, and plans for the day. A great start. Instead of scribbling down my shopping list on a piece of paper than then gets crossed out and added to, with some items practically unreadable, I just have shopping as a task and the list as the set of “action items” underneath it. Every time I check off an item I get a little sound. (Which can be turned off if desired, but I like it.) It’s much easier for me to see what I’ve bought and what I haven’t. Hey, anything to make grocery shopping more fun is a good idea.

This weekend we’ll be having Gideon’s birthday party and we’ve decided on another one of our complicated menus, with empanadas and potstickers. Two different food cultures, one methodology of wrapping food in dough. The Broncos are playing the Colts Sunday afternoon and we’re having dinner afterwards. I need to be READY ahead of time or I’ll miss part of the game! (That might be a good thing; we tend to get beat by the Colts.) Tune in Monday to see how it all went down!

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