Today, you have achieved nothing. If you resonate with this sentence – chances are that you are a female writer. Possibly, like myself, working from home. Whilst I know many men who tackle mundane chores, I am going to stick my neck out and say that most women I know have a to-do list as long as their arm that never really gets finished. The main reason for this is not for the want of trying but because more and more jobs keep getting added. I am all for keeping busy, reaching our full potential and achieving generally, yet there is a limit to how much one can get done on any given day.
If, like me, you are of a certain age, then you may well have been raised with a strong work ethic based on the notion that the devil will find work for idle hands. Like me, you may feel the need to keep ‘on top’ of every household chore alongside your regular work. And then there are those lists. I have two. One for work/writing related things, another in a section of my notebook labelled ‘lifemin’ which is everything else.
If you have a busy mindset most of your hobbies will involve making and doing and even watching television requires you to knit lest you feel guilty sitting doing nothing. And here’s the thing, no matter how much gets ticked off 'the list' – you still feel you are underachieving. You still feel that you have got nothing done.
Time then to give yourself a pause and consider just how much you have, in fact, accomplished. At the end of the day, by all means tick the list (what else is a list for?) but then go through your day piece by piece and give yourself a mental pat on the back for all that other stuff you did. The items not on the list – the stuff no one notices. That quick clean around the bathroom, the laundry you gathered off the radiators and distributed to rightful owners, the parched houseplants you saved, the shoe pile realigned into a paired and neat row. The letter you posted when you walked the dog. The fresh towel in the cloakroom and the buying of milk on the way home. Think of everything, large and small and I’ll chance a guess that you have, in fact, been extremely busy. Well done you.