How to Stop Stressing About Your To-Do List
When I was a kid, I remember sitting in the backseat of our green station wagon as we drove four hours down I-75 from Michigan to Ohio to visit my grandparents. It was the 1980s. No portable devices. Thus I was stuck with the most popular in-car entertainment for kids of the era: staring out the window.
I remember watching other cars go by. Sometimes we passed them and sometimes they passed us. Some were going our way. Some the opposite way. And I remember being struck by this thought....
We will never know all of them.
There were so many people, all headed to their own destinations. My young mind struggled to grasp that all these people were headed somewhere, just like us, and their “somewhere” was just as important to them as ours was to us.
To blow my young mind further, I realized that to them, we were just another car on the highway, a passing blur on their journey. They hardly gave us a second thought.
This amazed and disturbed me.
Because it points to a great truth--our collective smallness, the sheer vastness of the world, but within all of that--the power of each individual’s purpose. Our little green car was headed somewhere, darnit. And to us, that somewhere mattered.
I thought about this last night as I wrote out my daily schedule. I consulted my calendar and to-do lists, and I encountered a frustrating pattern...
There just isn’t enough time to do all the things I want to do.
I want to do a morning routine with meditation, exercise, and journaling. I want to schedule social media posts. I want to reach out to past clients, attend webinars, and make a healthy dinner for my family. I want to finish this article.
All of these to-do’s jostle for a spot on my schedule. And there just isn’t room for all of them. This makes me feel like a failure.
Somewhere, isn’t someone getting all of the things done? And why can’t I seem to do it?
This has been especially surprising to me during COVID-19. With its social distancing and forced stay-at-home orders, the pandemic promised to give me the one thing I’d always wanted... more time. I’d finally catch up. I’d finally cross everything off The List.
Cue my dismay when this did not happen.
But then I thought of those childhood car trips and realized another truth:
We can only go one place at a time.
We were on the highway, headed to my grandmother’s house. Along the way, we passed thousands of other possible destinations, but that day, at that time, we were only going one place. We could’ve worked ourselves up, fretting about the exits we didn’t take, the other cars taking those exits, and the possible experiences they were having. We could have chastised ourselves for not packing more into our trip.
Or we could’ve done what I did--sit back, stare out the window, and enjoy the ride to the one place we were headed that day.
When I think about my to-do list, I think about those car rides. We’re all on the road, headed somewhere, doing something. And if we can take a moment to look out the window and take it all in, maybe we’ll enjoy the ride, pleasurably anticipate where we’re going, instead of anxiously fretting about where we’re not.
So today, I’ll do one thing. One at a time. And when I find myself worrying that it’s not enough, that I’m some type of failure for not managing to do more, I'll remember those childhood car rides. I’ll put myself back in that metaphorical backseat, staring out the window, relaxing into the road I’m traveling today.
Sure, I’m just one car out of billions, but I’m my car. This is my journey. The only one I get to take. I can choose to relax into it or not. And today I want to enjoy the ride.
About the Contributor
Rose Lounsbury is a keynote speaker, simplicity coach, and Amazon bestselling author who helps busy people live happier lives by owning less stuff. She’s been featured in USA Today, Good Day Columbus, WYSO, WVXU, and Good Morning Cincinnati. She lives in Dayton, Ohio, with her husband and wild triplets (yes, you read that right). If you want to know how many towels she owns, watch her TEDx Talk, which has almost 500,000 views. You can also visit her online at her website, Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
