List Making

So, the latest rage among my friends has been to make a list of 101 things to accomplish in 1001 days. It is an alternative approach to making New Year's Resolutions, and one that seems to have caught on rather quickly. I agree that new year's resolutions are old hat, and are even more likely to fail than normal To-Do's for a variety of reasons. They are always the same (lose weight, work out more, eat healthier, blah blah blah). They are never well defined (how much weight, how will I work out, what is healthy eating). On top of that, they are usually not very well planned, often thought of on New Year's Eve when someone asks you, "So what are your resolutions this year?" Or worse, on January 1st, when you think to yourself, crap I need to do better this year...

In some ways, the 101 in 1001 list resolves those issues but, for other reasons, I don't really like this concept either. Most of all because I think defining a list so specifically (both in quantity of tasks AND time to accomplish them), forces the list maker onto a predefined path. Some people may not have 101 things they want to accomplish while others have well beyond that number. Some items may take years to get done (finishing a degree, turning first profit on a business, earning enough to retire), while others can be done immediately. Lists will be padded with easy tasks to accomplish first, giving the maker a warm fuzzy when he/she gets to check something off. Eventually, however, the tasks will get harder, the list will not change so frequently, and as the final days count down on several seemingly impossible tasks left, the unavoidable sense of failure will come.

While the concept of New Year's Resolutions or 101 things to do in 1001 days is admirable, I think both are inherently flawed so have decided to create my own list: Crap I Need To Do, Or Else...

Details on this innovative new concept are forthcoming.