The List

I made a frightening discovery at work yesterday: I was actually accomplishing something.

Out of a sense of desperation (more than anything else), my group started to build a list of everything that we do. Everything goes on the list and is tracked, from the smallest request for information ("Customer Service") to the large document. Everything is categorized. Everything is filed. If it's new, I add to the "new" category for that week.

Here's the odd thing that happened: even with adding 25% of new tasks to the total, I have still accomplished almost 40% of the items on my list within a month.

I can't remember the last time this happened to me.

I'd be lying to say that this is not moderately satisfying. For the first time (ever), I have a sequential record of what I am doing and how much of everything I am doing. I have a hard number that I can point to - and something I can buck myself up with by saying "Yes, I am making progress somewhere."

It's a fascinating feeling.

The next challenge is to figure out a way to adapt this to my personal life. It would be false of me to admit that the sense of doing things is not addictive and rewarding.

I just need to figure out how do things that are actually important to me.