Lists
19/07/16 05:34
Our mother was a person of lists. She preferred stenographer’s notebooks, with the spiral binding at the top. She made lists for all kinds of things. Our family used to go to family camp every year and she would keep the lists of what to take from year to year, carefully copying the previous year’s list and adding and deleting as necessary. We were a big family and we didn’t travel lightly. There were some years that it took a car and a pickup to get us up to camp. Mother made a set of matching shirts for everyone in the family each year and most weeks at camp, we wore matching shirts every day. As the oldest boy, I often was wearing several new shirts while my brothers wore hand-me-downs that I had worn previous years.
Mom’s lists didn’t stop with camp. She had lists for local shopping and lists for occasional trips to a larger city. She had lists for traveling in the airplane and different lists for traveling by car. She had lists of back to school items for each child and lists of birthdays and anniversaries for the extended family. She had address lists. These, too, were periodically hand-copied from one notebook to another and edited as she went. Each Christmas there was an elaborate process of editing addresses as she sent out our annual Christmas letter. As she received letters from others, the address list was updated. She could tell you who had received letters from us and who had sent letters to us for several years running.
I still have a few of those notebooks, including one of the last ones from her life, which contains lists of books she had read and when she finished them, including those that were re-read. As her memory slipped, she would repeat books that had been previously read and seemed to enjoy them as much the second or third time as she had originally.
I’ve never been quit as organized as our mother. I do make lists, mostly for short term projects such as shopping lists (which I now keep on my phone) “to do lists” (also kept on the phone and synchronized on my computer) and occasionally I’ll have a list of short term tasks on paper. I carry a small pocket notebook that mostly contains items that will be copied into the phone or computer as time allows and then the pages discarded. I doubt that there will be a legacy of lists for my children, though there may be a rather extensive digital database. Like my mother, I record the books that I read, posting them on this web site. Unlike my mother, I tend to get behind in my posting. As I write this morning there is a stack of at least six books that need to be posted to my site. I’ll get around to posting them one of these days.
My short term “to do” list keeps getting longer. We have company coming later this week and I need to get pictures hung in several places around the house. We did some painting last year and it set off an avalanche of moving pictures from one place to another and I’m not quite done. I have an unfinished boat under construction in the garage. The garden, devastated by the hail storm, needs to be cleaned up and I’ll spend the rest of the summer fighting weeds in an area that probably won’t produce much food. There are a couple of small repair projects on vehicles and the camper to which I should attend.
This list of tasks at work is even longer. Part of the nature of my work is that each day presents many reasons to re-prioritize my time. And I always go home in the evening with unfinished work on my desk. A few years ago I had a conversation with a retired teacher who said she had never left unfinished work from one day to another in an entire career of teaching. Her worldview and mine were so divergent that we found it nearly impossible to even maintain a conversation about the subject, let alone understand the other. I couldn’t fathom adding more hours to my work week and doubt that doing so would result in accomplishing more work. She couldn’t understand how I could have tasks that take 20 or 30 hours added into a normal work week. Another time I had a conversation with a pastor friend who said he always dealt with each piece of mail that came across his desk the same day that it arrived. In pursuing the conversation I learned that he was doing about the same number of funerals and weddings each year as I was doing each month. He reported on a week when he had two funerals in the same week. I can remember three weeks in a row in which I had a total of eight funerals.
This is not a complaint. I love my work and I find the pressures of constant change to be invigorating. But there is always more that could be done. And I tend to put off some chores, such as cleaning, using other chores as an excuse.
So I will continue to make lists and carry even more lists in my memory. I will continue to have enough work ahead to me to insure that there will never be a day of boredom. I will continue to head to the lake when there is unfinished work because I have learned from a lifetime of working that I can be more efficient and accomplish more if I am attentive to quiet time and contact with nature. Weeks without recreation result in accomplishing less, not more.
There is one chore that I do need to get to right away, however. I now have three picket notebooks that need to be sorted, there are a few phone numbers and addresses that need to be saved and a couple of notes that need to be copied in each of them. I need to get through them soon so I am not collecting a pile of notebooks. If I’m not careful, I’ll start to look like my mother, just with a different size of notebook.
Then again, a comparison with my mother would be a compliment in my mind.
Mom’s lists didn’t stop with camp. She had lists for local shopping and lists for occasional trips to a larger city. She had lists for traveling in the airplane and different lists for traveling by car. She had lists of back to school items for each child and lists of birthdays and anniversaries for the extended family. She had address lists. These, too, were periodically hand-copied from one notebook to another and edited as she went. Each Christmas there was an elaborate process of editing addresses as she sent out our annual Christmas letter. As she received letters from others, the address list was updated. She could tell you who had received letters from us and who had sent letters to us for several years running.
I still have a few of those notebooks, including one of the last ones from her life, which contains lists of books she had read and when she finished them, including those that were re-read. As her memory slipped, she would repeat books that had been previously read and seemed to enjoy them as much the second or third time as she had originally.
I’ve never been quit as organized as our mother. I do make lists, mostly for short term projects such as shopping lists (which I now keep on my phone) “to do lists” (also kept on the phone and synchronized on my computer) and occasionally I’ll have a list of short term tasks on paper. I carry a small pocket notebook that mostly contains items that will be copied into the phone or computer as time allows and then the pages discarded. I doubt that there will be a legacy of lists for my children, though there may be a rather extensive digital database. Like my mother, I record the books that I read, posting them on this web site. Unlike my mother, I tend to get behind in my posting. As I write this morning there is a stack of at least six books that need to be posted to my site. I’ll get around to posting them one of these days.
My short term “to do” list keeps getting longer. We have company coming later this week and I need to get pictures hung in several places around the house. We did some painting last year and it set off an avalanche of moving pictures from one place to another and I’m not quite done. I have an unfinished boat under construction in the garage. The garden, devastated by the hail storm, needs to be cleaned up and I’ll spend the rest of the summer fighting weeds in an area that probably won’t produce much food. There are a couple of small repair projects on vehicles and the camper to which I should attend.
This list of tasks at work is even longer. Part of the nature of my work is that each day presents many reasons to re-prioritize my time. And I always go home in the evening with unfinished work on my desk. A few years ago I had a conversation with a retired teacher who said she had never left unfinished work from one day to another in an entire career of teaching. Her worldview and mine were so divergent that we found it nearly impossible to even maintain a conversation about the subject, let alone understand the other. I couldn’t fathom adding more hours to my work week and doubt that doing so would result in accomplishing more work. She couldn’t understand how I could have tasks that take 20 or 30 hours added into a normal work week. Another time I had a conversation with a pastor friend who said he always dealt with each piece of mail that came across his desk the same day that it arrived. In pursuing the conversation I learned that he was doing about the same number of funerals and weddings each year as I was doing each month. He reported on a week when he had two funerals in the same week. I can remember three weeks in a row in which I had a total of eight funerals.
This is not a complaint. I love my work and I find the pressures of constant change to be invigorating. But there is always more that could be done. And I tend to put off some chores, such as cleaning, using other chores as an excuse.
So I will continue to make lists and carry even more lists in my memory. I will continue to have enough work ahead to me to insure that there will never be a day of boredom. I will continue to head to the lake when there is unfinished work because I have learned from a lifetime of working that I can be more efficient and accomplish more if I am attentive to quiet time and contact with nature. Weeks without recreation result in accomplishing less, not more.
There is one chore that I do need to get to right away, however. I now have three picket notebooks that need to be sorted, there are a few phone numbers and addresses that need to be saved and a couple of notes that need to be copied in each of them. I need to get through them soon so I am not collecting a pile of notebooks. If I’m not careful, I’ll start to look like my mother, just with a different size of notebook.
Then again, a comparison with my mother would be a compliment in my mind.