2/3/25: Resurrecting this one to remind myself not to fall into the same trap under my new boss. 😄
I am coming off my weekend work rotation, so I hope to catch up with everyone and all the NTT entries later today. In the interim, have a great one, all!
Since I tend to avoid to-do lists, I guess the answer to this one is easy.
Closest thing I’ve used to a to-do list is utilizing Outlook calendar on the job to track meetings and critical tasks, and that usually just for the reminders prior to said meetings or tasks in the event I am involved in something and don’t notice the time.
When I first became a supervisor, I carried a notebook and wrote down every little thing I came across. I thought everything was critical. When I had pages and pages of things I had to do, look into, order, etc., I realized I was merely drawing a roadmap to Hell.
Lesson still not quite learned, I thought post-it notes was the route to go. Less space, less writing, was my thought process.
I still carried the notebook, but was much more discerning about what I wrote down in it. It was mostly used for notes on critical actions assigned to me, shift hand-off notes, or dates/times/etc. for employee issues.
All the “to-do” tasks were on the post-it notes, and the system was working great until I ended up with this:
At that point, I realized the whole concept of “to-do lists” felt pretty stupid to me. All it did was leave me annoyed and agitated at all the shit I didn’t get done.
I realized that 99% of the crap I was writing down was all really part of a daily routine that I’d been performing so long, I knew it inside and out.
I ditched the to-do list, kept utilizing Outlook calendar and the notebook for highly important notes and ditched the rest. My life got a lot easier when I stopped writing and just started doing.
The Beginning At Last 
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