11 Jun A ‘must-do list’ or a wish list?

The method to reinject calm into your life with Time Surfing has been given the name that you no longer use lists.
The reason is simple: I once threw away my lists in a fit of clairvoyance (at the end of this post I will tell you what kind of method I use now).
That throwing away went like this:

List fanatic
At first I was a list fanatic you could say. I consider myself a perfectionist and my lists used to be very precise.
I used no less than three lists: one for my work (actor), one for zen (responsible for a meditation center) and one for home (father of a family with 3 kids).
The titles of the performances in which I played or directed were already pre–printed on my list.
One evening I am standing in front of my work desk. The three lists are in front of me. I just ticked off a few things but immediately added tasks again.
There is an unpleasant tension emanating from these lists. They make me feel that I‘m never done. They mainly show me what I still have to do. And that‘s a lot. I feel like in a rollercoaster but one that immediately starts again when you are about to be finished.

Like a blind man in the land of tasks
These lists make me anxious. Is this life now? Always so much to do and always too little done?
I am a Zen monk and responsible for a Zen center. In zen it is quiet, nothing happens and you are intimate and at peace with yourself. To then get back on this roller coaster immediately afterwards?
I take another good look at the lists and everything on them. Then I make a wad of them and throw them away.

From one moment to the next, I am like a blind man in the land of tasks.

A valuable process
This experiment eventually gave me the seven clues of Time Surfing. Throwing away the lists was not an end station, it was just a firm inner decision that I didn’t want to live this way anymore. While I didn’t know what would replace it.

What I began to see during this experiment without lists was that the way in which we generally take on a new task is very fleeting. We put it on a list so that we don’t forget it, then it’s ‘out of our heads’.

However, if you take on a task with a little more attention, you set a valuable process in motion. At the same time, this process is invisible.
Because we want to be able to see and control everything, we forget to get to know and use this precious process.

Unconscious thinking
Professor Dijksterhuis (Dutch author of the book ‘Het slimme onbewuste’) simply calls this process ‘unconscious thinking’. It means that after you have absorbed information, the unconscious part of yourself starts working on it. When you look at the same project next time, your vision about it has come a step further without noticing. Dijksterhuis describes how you can use this process when making difficult choices by ‘sleeping on it’.

In my frameless period, I notice that this ‘unconscious thinking’ is also an extremely functional tool in carrying out your tasks. And not only that: it also produces an almost flawless time manager. And so I arrive at a new form of making an inventory of my tasks and making choices in them. It doesn’t have to be as rigid as with to-do lists. A to-do list is actually a ‘must-do list’

What do you want to do today?
I, on the other hand, make a wish list!
‘I want to do this‘ sounds very different from ‘I have to do this‘ and also works differently.
You make the wish list at the beginning of the day. What do you want to do today?
Because you have let the tasks come in well, as I just described, the unconscious part of yourself knows very well what all your intentions are. You can write down the wish list effortlessly every day, right off the top of your head.
But nothing should stop you from keeping a written edition of these tasks as a backup elsewhere. Then the conscious part of yourself is also satisfied: after all, now it can see everything and check that you don‘t forget anything. Keep this list in the background, though. Gradually you will notice that you hardly need this ‘checklist‘.

Constant tailwind
I noticed something else: the wish list allows you to proactively choose what you want to do. More and more often you will notice that you are going to do your tasks at the right time. You have a tailwind all the time.

*This post has been automatically translated from Dutch