Capture It or It Will Capture You

Yesterday I enjoyed a great conversation with a friend. We talked about a zillion things, one of them being the need to “capture” all of our “to-do’s” in some way or another.

For some people, this means CLUTTER. They get magazines and think “I need to read that”, catalogs (“I might want something in there”), bills (“Must pay that”), party invites (“Must respond”), gifts (“Don’t forget to send a thank you note”), random mailings (“I should really get off of that mailing list”) … and then they keep all of those items “OUT” because otherwise, they might forget to do XYZ.

The problem, of course, being that once you have enough piles going, even they are no longer helpful to you. (“Somewhere in the bottom of that twelfth pile is a graduation invite that I really need to send a gift about … WHOOPS! It’s November. Bummer.”)

SO … even for people who don’t LOVE LOVE LOVE office supplies and for whom Sharpies and file folders are NOT happy HAPPY gifts, it’s wise to develop SOME level of systems for capturing the to-do’s so that they don’t capture you.

One of my friends laughs when I say, “Do you need a pencil?” in response to her, “I need to remember to do that comment.” Because OF COURSE, she’s WAY cooler than me and she deftly slides out her Ipod-thingy and tap-tap-tap, it’s DONE.

Some of us still have ACTUAL paper stickies in our lives. That’s OK. The 80’s were not the golden-old-y days for US. We’re groovy. We’re catching the task in our own low-tech way. No prob.

I assume most of us have some sort of combination of tech (Microsoft Office Tasklist!) and low-tech (white board by the phone) and I really don’t think it matters. Except for this: capture it somehow so you aren’t captured BY it. Otherwise it’s just too stressful. And you’re a busy person! You don’t have time or emotional energy to waste on worrying if you dropped something. Just capture it.

(Oh, yeah. Then periodically CLEAR THE DECKS and DO what you wrote down too. 🙂 )

With that, I’m off into my day.

Hope you have a blessed day! I’m hoping to write. Hah. I’m terrified but hoping I’ll “do it scared.”

Yours,
Tara B.