“Return the flash drive!”, “Sign up for an ultrasound”, “Plan for the week” … We regularly write down serious or not very serious cases in diaries and on leaflets, where we forget to look in a couple of days. What makes us do this? Do lists really make us more productive?
43-year-old Natalya never misses this ritual. Every Sunday evening, after dinner, she takes an A4 sheet and carefully cuts it into six pieces—for five work days each, and one for household chores on Saturday. In the upper corner of each sheet, she puts down the date, and below it – the tasks that need to be completed.
“Until I write it all down, it will be difficult for me to concentrate,” Natalya admits. “I feel lost if I don’t set specific goals for myself.” Natalya carries her lists in her purse and checks them ten times a day to see how she’s doing.
“Fixing on paper helps to keep in memory something fragile and short-lived,” says psychoanalyst Francois Legille. We spend time trying to remember what we should do now and what we have already done. Lists insure us by providing backups for things that elude us.”
We take the tasks listed on the list as homework. It helps us focus
It is not difficult for the unconscious to get out of our heads what is bothering us. As Freud amply demonstrated in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, we forget what we don’t want to remember. Some lists are insured against accidental memory lapses and kept within firm limits.
Like Natalya with her six pieces of paper, we take the listed tasks as our homework. “My natural state is laxity and terrible slowness,” she says. “And lists keep me focused.”
Sabina, 28, is aware that lists narrow her space, even though they force her to be more collected. “I am a very careless person, and this activity allows me to overcome chaos and restore at least some order in my life,” the girl explains.
But do lists bring any joy, or is it a form of punishment? Sabina admits that crossing out the next completed task with a black marker definitely gives her pleasure.
“Each crossed out line is a clear proof that we have fulfilled our duty,” confirms Francois Legille. “It is both a sign that we are able to organize ourselves and a rationale for our daily existence. We stick to the list in the hope that the day will go according to plan, in which everything is thought out to the smallest detail and there are no disturbing gaps. This is how we try to convince ourselves that we are in control of our lives.”
“Being in a state of uncertainty is unbearable,” adds clinical psychologist and psychotherapist Stephanie Ayusso. “That’s why we need so much that public life is subject to regulations and everyone has their own role and their own tasks that are supposed to be fulfilled. It is not customary for us to suddenly, for no reason at all, get carried away with something, get involved in something right here and now, without counting on a certain result.
Why do we rarely follow a plan?
But, of course, nothing ever happens the way we expect. Ask those who are obsessed with to-do lists, do they manage to cross off their items on time? No, or very rarely. Why? It seems to us that by fixing our obligations on paper, we will make them inevitable. In fact, we endow the written words with magical power.
“We are fickle by nature,” explains François Legille. “And so we are overcome by conflicting feelings, for example, the desire to complete the next task from the list and the pleasure of crumpling this very list and throwing it in the trash can.” The sweetness of breaking the rules can be hard to resist.
Another reason why we don’t follow through is procrastination. Psychotherapist Bruno Keltz lists three reasons why we put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today.
First, the simple fact that enjoyable activities are more enticing than important but boring ones.
Secondly, self-doubt: am I able to cope with the task that I have set for myself? Here, perfectionism is combined with the need to preserve self-esteem. By delaying the solution of the problem, we avoid the risk of not coping or making mistakes and being defeated.
Thirdly, this is our passive-aggressive reaction to restrictions: we slow down, rebelling in the depths of our souls against orders, although we may have established them ourselves.
But Stephanie Ayusso believes that we do not follow the program in cases where our plans are too vague or global.
What to do to make lists really help?
“Break your goal down into steps,” advises Bruno Keltz. – Instead of “cleaning up the bedroom”, set a simpler task: “sort out the shelves in the closet”.
Bruno Keltz notes that our lists are often poorly structured and not in order. “Before you ask yourself why we haven’t moved forward with their implementation, you should first ask yourself if all this really should be done, and if so, when,” he says. — That is why I often advise my patients to divide tasks into three groups:
- those that cannot be postponed;
- those that they will fulfill if there is time;
- the ones they’ll take care of when there’s nothing left to do.
And at the end of the day, it’s useful to put on the list what we have done beyond the plan, contrary to our own expectations, and for which we can separately praise ourselves. ”
In any case, it is useful to remember one of the main features of the list: it follows the principle of infinity and eternal renewal. What happens if we have nothing left to do?