Going beyond a "to do" list

Being a divorced parent with an overload of writing/editing work on my shoulders, I have FINALLY found the one thing to help me keep my sanity in all this chaos: Having a “to do” list.

Before, I used to suggest writers create a “to do” list to avoid any distractions from holding up their writing work. But now I have seen just how valuable this list can be for a writing parent going it alone.

Yesterday, for example, I had a number of tasks to perform. But instead of trying to do all of them, I took the most important tasks and made them my “to do” items for the day. These tasks were:

*Proofreading for the Skyline Literary Magazine we’re launching VERY soon.

*Giving my poetry manuscript some final touching up and submitting it to the publisher. (I printed it out and caught some punctuation mistakes.)

*Putting out the latest issue of my E-zine (where I happened to include a tip about using a “to do” list).

And even though it was almost 1 a.m. by the time I got the last item checked off, I finally crawled into bed feeling a deep sense of satisfaction of getting every task on my list done.

But I was also happy about something else: I managed to get OTHER pressing tasks done, too. Namely, the important stuff: Cleaning the house, spending quality time with my daughter, AND doing the yard work in the front and back yards. I was too worn out to rake up the front yard, but I did pick up trash that had blown into my yard. I DID forget to water the front yard (ugh), but I figured I could tackle the rest of the front yard duties tomorrow. At least it looked somewhat DECENT.

Juggling all of that was pretty taxing. And when I woke up this morning, I was still exhausted. It was going to take some strong coffee to get me out of bed this morning! Haha But I did get up. And I did put together another “to do” list for the writing stuff I need to do today. Some of today’s tasks are offline work, which I’m grateful for because I can at least print stuff out and write in my notebook – while I’m busy doing all the OTHER non-writing jobs I’ve got on my hands every day.

The list is helping me stay on my writing path, though. And it’s also helping me to eliminate the worry of what exactly I can get done when.