When I’m itching for a sense of control I write stuff down. I often jot out a list rather than paragraphs, because that way I can see individual pieces otherwise lost among the jumble of thoughts and ideas.

On Monday I offered the first Golden Rule of a saner To-Do list: always identify the one item that you want to get done each day, even if nothing else on the list gets done. This gives you a focal point for your action items AND gives you a better shot at having a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day.

Golden Rule #2 is keep the list trim.

To-do lists can put on some serious pounds with surprising speed. As with waistlines, once the pounds are on, it’s no cake-walk to drop them.

I used to handle to-do lists the way many road warriors have become resigned to buying pants — elastic is a must-have. I used to work in one of those environments where your back-log of action items was as much a badge of honor as your frequent flyer status. If you weren’t perpetually behind the eight-ball you weren’t pulling your weight. (If you hadn’t achieved Medallion membership, you weren’t on-the-road enough.)

Once I left that environment, I ultimately had the ah-ha that busyness has no bearing on productivity. That my to-do lists could produce cogitation not agitation, ease not vexation, order not mayhem, and above all — a feeling of completion not incompletion.

Changing the to-do list habits didn’t happen overnight. It was a process of learning to identify, sort, cull and prioritize. (Sorry, no cute acronyms come to mind.) The result is good enough without one: a practice that swaps bulk for the 10-12 bits that I want to get done for the week not the day.

I plan on 10-12 to-do’s per week, but I assume that there will be a few more. Time is left open to handle what shows up and what requires more time than originally thought. And I’m strict about curbing just how many unplanned to-do’s I’m willing to take on.

Now, every week I feel I’ve accomplished some action items that reflect what matters most. Every week my wins column contains more ticks than my no-wins. Every Friday is now a segue to R&R rather than catching-up or a desperate attempt to sprint ahead. Every week I can safely say that if I lose my wits, my to-do list has nothing to do with it.

Am I playing a kind of numbers game. Maybe. Who cares? I’m content. I’m getting shit done and I’m not depleted by the effort.

It’s not that I don’t have enough in the pipeline or that I couldn’t expand my list. Rather, I’m being very deliberate in my choices: reality and reason; expectations of the unexpected and the wiggle room needed to accommodate them, a platform for progressing not falling behind.

To wind things down let me repeat Golden Rule #2 of saner To-Do lists: slim your list.

The “slimming” threshold will differ per person. Mine is 10-12 items for the week, which roughly translates to 1-3 per day. Some might do better with 8 per week and 1-2 per day; others can nudge it up to 15 or 18 per week and 3-5 per day. Start low and add on. Find your mode and don’t worry about what others might think.

Other signs that your daily or weekly to-do list is too long? A few clues:

• You’re afraid to look at it.
• It fills the length of an 8×11 piece of paper. Worse, both sides of said paper.
• Your stomach knots, your head hurts, your heart races, your palms sweat, and/or your teeth clench when you look at it.
• The number of items equals the age of your grandmother.
• Your online calendar is chock full of entries displayed in red.
• Should you have a break down one day, vengeance will rule and the T-D will become TP.

Note:  This post came out of a project called Thirty Voices, for which nearly thirty women in their thirties living in various parts of the world wrote about various themes over the course of a year.  I don’t remember the theme that triggered this piece. I forgot to keep notes.  Ooops.

Up until about a week ago, Georgia (the whole southeastern US actually) suffered from extreme, exceptional drought conditions. In June, Atlanta imposed watering restrictions, meaning once per week you can water your garden. No one is supposed to wash their car. We’re supposed to be rationing the laundry.

Early July brought some rain, but towards the end the rain died off and in August the temperatures soared into the triple digits. I began walking the dog at midnight because it was cooler. That’s when I discovered all of the midnight watering taking place. Neighbors who we commiserated with by day about the drought and heat were out in baseball caps and dark pajamas pointing a hose at their flower beds with the porch lights turned off.

As Rufus and I passed they turned their backs, and I looked the other way. No understanding nods passed between us, no apologetic glances.

Now I understood why a freshness emanated from certain yards when I walked Rufus in the mornings, why their yards smelled sweet and the ones next to them smelled dead. For every three or four yards where the grass was browned out or even the ivy looked stressed, there was at least one yard where the vinca bloomed profusely and the fescue thrived. Uh huh! Midnight waterers.

Truth be told, I was pissed. And envious.

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I won’t claim any expertise with lunar cycles. I know that yesterday was the Full Moon, and that the next New Moon comes in approximately 15 days. I know this only because a friend of mine, Jill, has a ritual involving each. When it’s a Full Moon, she mediates on what she wants to let go of — it could be the stack of clothing that needs to go to GoodWill or some point of contention she’s been harboring. The point of letting go is to make room for the new beginnings that mark the New Moon phase. The New Moon is when Jill sets fresh intentions and meditates on what she wants to ask for from life and herself. Very cool.

I’ve long admired Jill’s ritual, and perhaps one of these days I’ll try to knit it into my life. But for now, I have my practice of Mental Shampooing (while shampooing) that helps me suds up the truth of what might really be bothering me or what really matters, and then I rinse out much of the icky build up.

This little ritual came about after I stumbled upon what is now one of my favorite quotes (by Sara Jordan – despite Google searches I’m not quite sure who she is/was): “every day give yourself a good mental shampoo.” No instruction booklet needed for these words of advice. It worked right out of the box, and I took to it immediately. Sometimes the literal can lead to the sublime.

Mental shampooing, I’ve found, isn’t a magic wand. It doesn’t make problems go away. There may still be plenty I have to deal with once I’m out of the shower. But I’m in a better frame of mind to do just that, and that’s what makes this simple act so successful.

My one complaint: I find myself humming a certain song from South Pacific. Ugh!

At the start of the work week, I plan my goals and action items for the week. I look at what I want AND need to accomplish in the next seven days. Nothing unusual there. The size of that To-Do list, though, might surprise some people. At most, I allow 10-12 items on the list for the week. That’s it. Even then, I sometimes think my list is a bit ambitious.

In my professional organizer days, I had clients who had twenty To-Do’s or more for a single day. Did they ever knock out that list? Very rarely. Was that because they were unproductive, lazy, crazy? No, no, perhaps but not relevant to this topic. Were they haunted by the backlog of To-Do’s? Hell, yeah. Did this help them in any way shape or form? Hell, no.

Overloaded to-do lists will drive you mad. If left unchecked, To-Do list mania dents a person’s ability to gauge their productivity. It becomes an exercise of counting negative numbers in a relentless game of chase.

My words of wisdom are simple: stop the overload and put your to-do list on a strict diet.

I’m spouting that advice like it’s an easy peasy conversion for a die hard list maker who’s been recording their to-do’s this way for, like, forever. Who’s likely to-do listing the same way as their co-workers, not to mention their boss who’s not known for being receptive to reasonable limits. It’s like asking a lifelong smoker to quit cold turkey.

So, I’m not suggesting a dramatic reversal right now. Rather, I’m suggesting a gradual shift that starts with the first golden rule of balanced To-Do’s.

Golden Rule #1: The first item on your list is the ONE action item that is most important for that day, that you will commit to completing, even if interruptions cause you to zig zag to and from it.

If nothing else is done but that one action item, the day is a success. This approach asks you to tweak your definition of productivity — a tall order, I know. But if your current method of dealing with action items leaves you perpetually underdogged, it’s time to sort through the costs of that method. How much more might you actually get done, if you set yourself up to succeed rather than fall behind?

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to try out TDL Golden Rule #1 for 21 days. At the end of those 21 days, look at how many of those top-priority action items were done. If you see a difference, you’re ready to take on TDL Golden Rule #2.

One Friday night I was on my own.  After a long week, I was blissfully looking forward to an R&R evening of movies and home delivery of some goodies from our favorite Chinese restaurant. Everything went more or less according to plan for the R&R until around midnight when I finally cracked open my fortune cookie. It’s words of wisdom: “You should enhance your feminine side at this time.”

I caught my reflection in the kitchen window: baseball hat, baggy t-shirt, and ratty baggy shorts. I looked down at my feet and saw toesies badly in need of some pedicuring.

So, maybe the cookie had a point.

But really, what’s on my mind is the anonymous authorship of these cookie fortunes. Who and where are the people who write these little messages? How does one get chosen for that job? What are the qualifications? Is it fun? It must be. Or not. Hard to say.

I imagine whoever wrote mine is sick of being anonymous. They want, somehow and someway, for their work to be known. If they’re lucky their work has a ten-second life span. So why not, they think, give people a reason to hang on to that slip of paper a little longer.

It worked. I have that oddball, ballsy message taped to my laptop. And so I remember to give dear Anonymous a moment of recognition.