Sense My Tension

I've never been a fan of the "To Do" list. Some people love to make lists and check things off after they're done but I've never been that person. Even as a kid in school I usually didn't write down homework assignments. Unless there was something really specific I had to remember. Otherwise I just kept what homework I had to do in my head. Oddly I found that if I wrote my assignments down I would not only forget them but also forget that I wrote them down. It was easier for me to just remember.

I've noticed that a lot of people who like "To Do" lists are also procrastinators. They use the list to motivate themselves to get things done. I am the opposite of a procrastinator. If I have stuff to do I want it done as quickly as possible and out of the way so I can be free to do what I want. The more time I wait before getting things done on a "To Do" list the more time I have to think about doing those things. Thinking about getting things done takes way more effort than actually doing them. At least to me.

One thing I don't understand about procrastinators is what the heck they are doing with all that procrastination time? They usually claim to be wasting it (at least in internet status updates) but wasting it doing what? What people consider wasted time varies. I occasionally like to play video games in my leisure time but I don't consider that wasted time. But maybe if I played video games in the time that was alloted for work it would be. I'm not sure. I like to get things done so I can spend as much of my time my way as possible. If I'm spending time doing what i want it's never wasted. Wasted time is spent doing what I don't want to do.

Though I'm not a fan of the "To Do" list I have recently gotten back to my "What I did today" lists. Half of my work is freelance stuff that I do for the dough and half is my own art that I do for myself. I have no career in the usual sense of the word so I don't have the satisfaction of moving up the ladder at work which usually give people there sense of accomplishment. I have to find my accomplishments where I can.

In that spirit I used to write down in a calender what I did that day. I've always been fairly prolific when it comes to making my own art but most of it ends up being filed away. It's not all where I can see it so it won't necessarily leave me with a sense of accomplishment. That's why I started writing what I did for the day down. At least I could flip through the pages of my calender and, at a glance, see that I did things. I had some small number of accomplishments.

I fell out of this habit a couple of years ago. I'm not sure why. I think I just got tired of calenders. I had a bunch of them stacked up on a shelf and they looked too much like years going by. That made me a little wistful.

Recently I started using the iCal calender on my computer. I had to keep track of a few things in it so I decided to start writing down what I did for the day in there. It's not perfect program and kind of clunky for this sort of thing but I can sync it with my iPod. My sense of accomplishment has gone portable. It's kind of fun again.

I started naming some of the drawings that I've been working on just so I can keep track of them in iCal. I found in did me no good, I got no sense of accomplishment, from writing, "Worked on drawing today". "Worked on drawing named 'Sense My Tension' today" gave me more of a glimpse of what I did that day. And I like coming up with names for things.

So there you have it. No "To Do" lists but plenty of "What I did today" entries. That's how things are over here. I think I'll go enter that I wrote this blog today.