Check!

Remember the episode of FRIENDS where Monica says “Passport, check! Camera, check! Traveller’s cheques, check! You do a good thing, you get a check!”

Well I am not a neat freak like Monica and I don’t feel the compulsion to clean. But I love to make checklists for everything…and I mean everything. If I am bored, I make a check list of what I am going to do the whole day in breakups of 15 mins. I am not OCD, I jus like to plan my week, and my day, and my hour. I realized if I planned ahead I could get more work done. Strangely, the person who gets most annoyed by my ‘checklists’ and my systematicism is my mom. She get mad that I know well in advance what I am going to do and refuse to change plans to accommodate her random plans which she makes in the last minute. Shouldn’t it be the other way round?

5 years ago, I would have been the last person to plan so much. I could not be bothered with deadlines, and most often I would late in submitting my work. I suppose my bosses were lenient and I had a lot of time in hand. So there was no need to do anything systematically. Then I started my part time Masters and shifted jobs into research. My Prof used to keep me on my toes. Deadlines were always preponed by atleast half the time; He would say “Can you complete this in 3 weeks?” Most definitely after 1 week he will come round to ask if its completed. By week two if it was not completed I would have to hear a long lecture from him on how I am so ill organized and slow. We would start the month with 5 tasks, and it would grow to 15 by mid month. Of course I couldn’t quit dance just cos I was doing my Masters. That was the time I spent most of my weekdays in my lab and my weekends in dance class. It was around that time I started making checklists.

I used to even think how I could maximize my time such that I used even travel time to do some small bits here and there. There were many many weeks when I used to only sleep 2-3 hours a day and catch 15 minute naps every now and then. I suppose I continued to plan even after I stopped studying and working for my Prof, cos I liked it. I seemed to be able to do so many things if I had planned my days, my errands and my routes.

The problem with all this is that I tend to pack up my days. I feel suddenly I have all this time in hand that can be used. I forget to take into account that sometimes plans are just meant to fail. I push myself to finish as many things as possible. Even things which can be postponed for later. Of course on the day that I do make a Plan B I end up succeeding with plan A and extra time in hand!!!

But it never occurred to me that I do so much of it until this morning I found a checklist I made last week, planning each day for next week, with specific times. I have clubbed errands according to route such that I don't go to the same place for different things on different days. The more I looked at my checklist, I felt a little sad that my life has become so mechanical.