Life Is Short, To-Do Lists Are Long
“The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control — when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer”
As I write this, last weekend I got together with my lifelong best friend, David Cottingham. We’ve known each other since high school. We met, caught up, and talked about deep things as we always do (we make lists before we meet). The second to last point on that list was ‘what makes life worth living.’
We said goodbye Sunday, texted Monday, then he died suddenly Tuesday.
I’m still processing the loss and grieve with his family. It’s beyond trite to say that life is short so get on with it. Maybe we need to state it differently.
Things change; nothing is fixed. We try to grip water as if it’s a solid.
One of the things he told me before we ended our weekend was he had a backlog of work bids (he owned a home services business) to finish. For our getaway, he put them off. Since then, I’ve wondered about the bids and all the customers he would not get back to. He left that undone. He could have postponed our weekend to catch up on work, but he didn’t. I’m so very grateful for that.
Something I had planned to do when I returned was publish my latest podcast episode, already edited and ready. It is a conversation with Oliver Burkeman, the British writer and author of the book Four Thousand Weeks, subtitled, and I’m emphasizing here, Time Management for Mortals.
Hence, the conversation is about our relationship to time, which given the recent circumstance, now seems almost prescient; you can listen to it here.
So thinking about those bids, I’ve since been wondering what I would be willing to leave undone if I passed away. The obvious corollary being, what would I NOT want to leave undone — or at least attempted, before I pass?
There are many approaches to time management, but very few focus on a “not to do” list or “okay if undone” list. Prioritizing has always been challenging for me, but I find adding something to an “okay-undone” list, things that are important to me, quickly surface — in flashing bold letters.
This episode covers productivity from a more philosophical framework. The truth that we only have a limited amount of time is an excellent forcing function but, more often than not, results in our trying to wrestle time to fit our plans.
Therein is the rub. Like trying to go to sleep, it has the opposite effect.
During our conversation, Oliver makes the case that many of our attempts to optimize time can leave us stressed and unhappy. The first sentence in Four Thousand Weeks is: “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.” (About 4,000 weeks, on average; thus the title.).
Oliver asks us to step into finitude, living with the awareness of that reality, then from that, make your plans and your lists.
That message has been brought home to me again this week.
Goodbye Dave, friends like you make life worth living.
