I don’t remember when I started making to-do lists for my weekend. I usually write them down on paper. After all, a 48-hour reprieve from the everyday rush is always too short—especially considering it’s rarely 48 hours of reprieve at all. There are floors to vacuum, bills to pay, and family members to call. So let’s make the most of it!
As time wore on, I often found myself with such a long weekend to-do list, I’d start adding in my hobbies and fun activities. “If I can’t fit them in around the edges, I might not find time for them at all!” I thought. So I wrote those down, too, and the list became a balancing act of trying to get the right mix of items done.
Recently, I was sick towards the end of a week. Saturday happened to be the first day I was back with the living. I hadn’t made a weekend to-do list yet, and I ended up forgetting it altogether. Since I wanted to feel fresh and rid the house of the last virus cells, I did some cleaning. Making beds, washing sheets, scrubbing toilets. By the afternoon, I had done a lot of chores.
I went through what else I thought needed doing in my head. “Call grandma. Get a haircut. Fold the laundry. Oh! I probably won’t do all of this today. I should write these down!” But right then and there, I stopped. “Really? Should I?” Somehow, my weekends had started happening under the soundtrack of the same humdrum to-do list beat that dominates the workweek, which has its uses, of course, but I had only noticed it now that I had accidentally broken out of my steady rhythm. “To-do lists might also work on weekends, but maybe weekends aren’t for to-do lists,” I thought.
Being the OCD-type that I am, I ended up with a compromise: I scribbled my remaining tasks on a piece of paper, but then I turned it upside down. “This way, I can look if I forget, but only if I really need to.” My brain got the satisfaction of knowing nothing would get lost, and I got the inner peace of not having a to-do list for my weekend.
I don’t know how far this experiment—in what is perhaps only returning to the sensible norm—is going to go, but I do know this: Life feels better when I have fewer lists. Maybe that’s the only information I need to write down.