Tuning into my Yammering Silent To-Do List

 Do you have a silent to-do list? Have you even heard of one? I hadn't until I read Fumio Sasaki's book, Good-bye Things. Here's the gist of it in a nutshell. The silent to-do list is all of those things that are NOT on your to-do list but that still impinge on your consciousness as you walk by them. The item itself is silent... but the voice in your head is not!

• The bookshelf that needs dusting - "Shoot, gotta dust that. What if guests come over (well... not during Covid obviously) and think I'm a complete house slob!"
• The little tchotchke sitting on the counter that needs a glue job - "Right, gotta look for the Crazy Glue. I don't think we have Crazy Glue. Gotta remember to buy Crazy Glue." 
• The frayed tea towel - "Gotta fix that or toss that. But we don't have a sewing machine. But it's still a useful towel except for that fraying hem."
• The books that haven't been read - "No time... but one day! Just not today. It's too thick for today. Maybe I should let it go? No, I paid good money for that book. Maybe I'll read it tomorrow."
• The messy desk that needs organizing - "Not right now... maybe tomorrow."
• The email in the Inbox that needs a reply - "Ooohhh... still don't know what to say, will wait till inspiration strikes..."
• Those family tree documents that need to get processed and entered into the tree - "One of these days... when I have time..."
  
• And on and on it goes.

I don't know about you, but I have dozens... maybe hundreds of these little silent to-do list items pinging off me over single day. And that's on top of everything that's on my regular to-do list, the big items. And, I have to say, all that pinging, and the continual batting away of things in my head, is exhausting... and overwhelming.

Now, Sasaki says the solution is... wait for it... less things. Which makes sense. Less things means less pinging and less activity in my head. If the bookshelf didn't have so many tchotchkes on it, it would be easier to dust. If we didn't have that little tchotchke in the first place, it wouldn't need repair! Although... one still needs tea towels... and books... and documents. But there are obviously work-arounds to all of those things. Do we really need to save every document and receipt? Can they be tossed or just scanned and then tossed? And books... oh books are a whole other thing... requiring a whole separate blog post.

Suffice to say, Sasaki's little piece has opened my eyes to the things that are looking at me with pleading, mournful, regretful eyes. The things that I need to take care of... and what I'm beginning to realize is that... some of those things... I don't want to be responsible for them anymore. They weigh me down and I've only got so much energy and enthusiasm for care-taking. I am not, after all, a museum curator!

Here's an example... we have a whole slew of vases that my partner loves to fill up with various flowers from the garden. Some of those vases are ones that I picked up on travels and, unfortunately, one of those got broken. I had had it for 20 years and I was sad and angry that it got broken. But, I worked through that fairly quickly by acknowledging my emotions. After all, it's only a vase. It's only stuff. But I'm one of those people who has a fairly strong emotional attachment to some of that stuff (MY stuff). Some of my stuff contains memories and there are so many emotions attached to those memories. I don't want to lose the stuff because I'm afraid that I will lose the memory that goes with it.

After the broken vase episode, I went through the vase cupboard and pulled out some of my favourite ones and put them on the bookshelf in my office. "There! Now they won't get used and won't get broken." They've been sitting there for months now, cluttering up the bookshelf (that needs dusting) and mutely staring at me every time I look at them. Because, really, they are vases and their purpose is to hold flowers, not to clutter up a bookshelf, even if they are safe there. Sigh... So I put them back into the vase cupboard. Que sera sera. Nothing lasts forever and it's much lighter on the bookshelf now without those little vases nagging at me. Now, there's just some unread books... nagging at me...

I know that David Allen's Getting Things Done method suggests taking a stack of papers (recycled of course - and maybe cut into eights) and writing down every loose end, every incomplete task, every thing that needs doing on a separate piece of paper. You then take each piece of paper and decide on the next actionable step (small step) for that particular to-do item and then enter it into your to-do list or task manager or whatever. It's a fairly time intensive process and I've only ever done it once, but I hang onto bits and pieces of the system. I think, now that I know about the silent to-do list, I would likely have 100s of items on those little pieces of paper. A tad overwhelming but... if the yammering silent items actually got captured and processed onto a to-do list... maybe they wouldn't yammer so much. Or my mind wouldn't yammer so much.

And perhaps the real question isn't... when/how am I going to get this thing done... but rather, does this thing even really need to get done?

Does this massive book really need to get read? Or can I just let it go? But I might read it someday! Really?? Ya think? Well... maybe not. But I paid good money for it! So that's a good reason to keep it hogging space on the bookshelf and taking up space in your yammering mind? Sigh... maybe not. Perhaps I could sell them on Kijiji or Ebay? Oh, for Pete's sake! Think about it... do you really want to put that much effort into a book that might get you $10? Sigh... maybe not...

I don't think I'm quite ready to follow in Sasaki's footsteps, at least not to the extremes that he went to... but, I am moving in the direction of letting more things go. It can be done. If only to quite the yammering in my head!