Checklists, checklists, checklists

Hello!

As I’m flying back from my honeymoon with 4 more hours to spare, rejuvenated and ready to go at my life with increased vigor, it seems to be the perfect time to update a bit on my thoughts. One would feel like that after diving in the ocean for the first time and climbing to 2200m above sea level on a different day. The well-awaited vacation was anything but passive.

Most likely I’ve mentioned before, but I’m big on checklists. Firstly it helps me remember things and my memory issues on trivial things aren’t so prominent. There’s no shame in writing things down. Especially since my chief from the times I was in construction in Munich, he wrote things down religiously to remember and keep track. The fact he worked and enjoyed life like he was eternally youthful, I admired it so much. Still to this very day I consider him a mentor and inspiration for the type of life I want to live. He called himself and his brand (aka company named after himself) Legendary with a deliberately capital L and he is right. Wholly Legendary.

I tried at first to use a physical notebook. It worked to an extent, but because there’s a lot of rescheduling and volatility in my plans (work included), I retired my calendar book after a few months.

Next, different checklist apps, from simple Google Keep to gamifying versions like Habitica. Habitica stuck with me for about half a year until the community (“Guild”) became progressively inactive. I decided then that I didn’t like to be reliant in my own personal progress.

A previous colleague of mine showed me how she adds her work schedule to her phone calendar which backs up. Seemed tedious at first. Still kind of is, but it’s only for 15 minutes a month that it takes for me to add all the workdays with appropriate emoticons signifying different shifts. I started colour-coding as well to make it more pleasant for me.

This method has stuck with me for about a year now, and as I changed phones, to my great relief everything was backed up and running. Now I saw facebook has an option to add an event straight to my calendar. Mostly sports or cultural ones are marked ‘Interested’. I haven’t used it yet, but I definitely will.

Also I really love telling people “I’ve penned you in” when we agreed on doing something, makes it sound very formal and professional.

Next up is the checklist. This time a simple app called Tasks, the fact I could make the interface very pink (a colour I seldom use but when I do it’s hot/neon) made me a fan. So my hot-pink checklist. The holder of trivial things that seem to escape me a lot of times.

I tried the 1-3-5 method. In total 9 checklist items. 1 very important, 3 medium importance, 5 trivial ones. I kept to it for about 2 months, it was good. What I didn’t like about it was how particular the items got. “Clean THIS, Put away THAT,” it got a bit too specific for my tastes. For me the tried and true peacekeeper of the household was to do about 2 chores a day.

Also changing the list every single day and spending time to mark priority was tedious. But I still have a checklist there. Two actually. One is daily, cleaning is separated into 2 different categories.

Korista – Clean.

Korrasta – Declutter

Most things are very ambigious like ‘discuss things with my husband’, check my budgeting, etc. And then you see the second tab “Korraline” that means to be done once and not daily. Stuff like renewing my passport, calling my mother, organizing something, looking something up, picking something up at the post office etc. There’s usually about 3-5 items on that list at a time. Right now it works for me, but I’m always tweaking.

So this is a digital system that I have in place and keeps me going in a much more organized route than I have most of my life. My phone s glued to my and most of the time anyway, luckily in an increasingly more productive way, namely ebooks. I’d love to hear about other methods of keeping a plan, schedule or a checklist, there’s definitely many different ones that spark joy for people.

With that I’ll be signing out for now, thank you for reading!

-Ann

Listening to: Black Strobe – I’m A Man