The tyranny of lists

There's a vignette in Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days that relates how a man--covertly dissatisfied with his life--abandons his wife and daughter and even his own name. The trigger is a "To Do" list that contains as many items as his years in age. Ironically, he had written the list himself.

I was somewhat chagrined today, having scratched out a "Things I have no excuse not to do, now that the semester's done" at my work desk, only to (later) realize that my sense of deja vu came from the fact that a very similar list has been half-hiding on my home desk for weeks on end.

All the same, I pretty much live and die by "To Do" lists, whether they're on scratch paper or in bug tracking databases. But here's what: It's entirely up to the person making the list to decide whether they will allow it to be a tyrant or a benevolent dictator. If you convince yourself that someone (or something) else is "making" you do these things, then the list owns you. When you take responsibility for the trade-offs involved in adding and/or omitting list-items, you own the list. Big difference, in terms of attitude--and, I strongly suspect, the likelihood of crossing off those line-items.