To List or Not To List

In life before kids, my husband and I would do the weekly shop together; an opportunity at the beginning of the weekend to spend some time together after a busy week at work. We would write a shopping list. I would carry the shopping list. About half way around the shop, loading a shopping basket as we went, he would ask what else was on the list. Oh, the list! I hadn’t once looked at the list.

This sums up my relationship with lists. I’m not really a list kinda person. And yet, for a not-a-list-kinda person, I do find myself writing a lot of lists.

At school and university, I never really wrote lists. I kept everything I needed to do, or know, in my head. Ah, those were the days. My early working experience was quite similar. As I took on more responsibility and started to manage a team of people, there was too much to keep in one head so I started to keep a to do list. Over the years, I’ve tried many different methods of keeping track of all the to do’s. In recent years, I’ve trained myself to use the bullet journal technique, drawn by the appeal of containing all to do’s, thoughts, ideas, and things to remember in one place.

However, my behaviour of not really using the lists I write — whether contained in a BuJo, or otherwise — remains. I write the lists then I proceed to ignore them. A cursory glance here and there, combined with my usual trick of…