I never liked to cook. Eventually, I hated to cook. Finally, I refused to cook.
In the beginning I cooked because I needed to eat. But I didn’t like it very much. It was just a chore I tried to get through as fast as I could.
Then I had kids. And kids needed to eat. So for the better part of 20 years I cooked breakfasts, prepared school lunches, and made dinner. And since my now-ex was often gone, I was doing this while also trying to work, tend to the dogs, get the kids to their events and helping them with their homework. It was hell. I became pretty worn down, actually, and I remember in the late 2000s every night in the late afternoon sitting down with an espresso and a cocktail trying to motivate myself to cook yet another meal.
Then my now ex started medical school. And somehow I was expected to cook for her (and her classmates) too. And to be supportive I did it. And that, among other things, broke me.
For more than five years, I’ve all but refused to cook. I’ll be an assistant cook (“Rob, would you turn the oven on to 400”), I’ll prep cook (maybe), I’ll clean up, but otherwise I want to eat out at restaurants, eat take away food (note: I’m American but prefer the Brits use of Take Away over To Go 🙂 ), or warm up food, but I all but refuse to cook.
But yesterday Larissa had a super busy day that went until the early evening. I knew she was tired, and didn’t want to go to a restaurant, and didn’t want to think about cooking food (she normally likes to cook but has been so busy the past few weeks), so I decided to take it off her plate.
And I cooked.
I spent half an hour researching “healthy hearty simple” soup recipes. I found one that seemed very very healthy and tasty, and had a prep time listed as 10 minutes. So I went to the grocery store, purchased all the spices and vegetables and broths, came up, turned the music up high, and started cooking.
Did it take much longer than 10 minutes? Heck yes! These prep times assumes someone has a commercial kitchen with vast amounts of experience dicing and slicing things. But that’s okay. I got into a zen moment, did what needed to be done, and when Larissa got home a delicious soup was waiting for her.
Anyway, sometimes in life we have to break through our resistances. For me, that is cooking. I’m happy I cooked last night. I hope to do it again soon.
When I was born, we’d never been to the moon. It’s possible it was all a hoax and we still haven’t been to the moon, but let’s assume that it’s real and we indeed have been to the moon. That was the year after I was born. Pretty amazing. In my lifetime, so much has changed, of course. There are too many inventions and changes to even begin listing since we all know what those are. But, for me, the greatest inventions have been autopay and digital music.
How much I hated paying bills before the 2000s. How much drudgery it was. There were checks to write, stamps to buy so I could send in those checks, reconciliation at the end of the month to make sure everything was accurate. Then for every day spending there was so much speculation how much cash I might need, then persistent worry I might lose or miscalculate the cash. Now it all — everything — just goes on my Visa which I can then peruse in a few minutes at the end of the month, challenge quickly online with Visa if something seems amiss, and then pay with the click of a button. Every expense imaginable goes on that credit card, and it has just made everything so much easier to deal with!
And then there’s music.
How much time did I waste in my life making mixed tapes. Or rewinding cassettes. Or cleaning records. How much money I spent for albums that overall I didn’t like very much but had two songs I liked. And how many times did I have to listen to a song over and over and over again on the radio until the point a song that I might have once liked became absolutely intolerable to listen to, not to mention all the ads in-between songs. But with digital on-demand music, every song I could possibly imagine is right there for free.
The world has changed so much. Many of these have been bad, some of these have been good, and there’s no doubt it has changed the world so very much in 50 short years.
But my favorite changes are on-demand music and auto pay. They’ve made my life so much easier and more enjoyable — every single day.
Something on your “to-do list” that never gets done.
WHAT IS SOMETHING THAT NEVER GETS DONE ON MY TO DO LIST? Nothing. Because nothing is on my to-do list. Because the world doesn’t make time anymore for to-do lists. Explained…
Years ago I carried around two notebooks everywhere I went.
The first notebook were my notes. Every call, every meeting, every day, I jotted down the date and who I was talking to and then took detailed notes in real time, often writing in my notebook while keeping my eyes focused on the person in front of me (i.e. I was the master of the no-look note-taking 🙂 ).
The second notebook was my to-do list. After every single meeting, I copied my to-do items into that list, then every single day I religiously reviewed that list to make sure I was addressing everything I needed (or promised) to take care of.
Sometime in the early 2010s, I switched to Excel — I had a tab devoted to my to-do list, and then in 2015 I moved from Excel to One Note for keeping track of Asks. In fact, OneNote — and the tables feature in particular — was awesome!
One of the things I’m most proud of was in 2019 when I had a critical opportunity I was working on. My larger team was struggling (way behind in its numbers) so needed the revenue from this major opportunity I was working on, and my client really needed our (or at least someone’s) SaaS solution to increase their online sales by 400%. Because it was important, the opportunity had a lot of people weighing in on it: my CEO, the client’s CEO, my client’s CFO, my client’s head of PMO, my client’s dozen mid-level people contributing to or influencing the buying process, and the Client Executive Sponsor who was funding the project, not to mention my internal sales engineers and stressed out sales manager who needed the deal to close to presumably keep his job.
Every single day during the critical middle-few months of this opportunity several items were added to my to-do list for that opportunity, and each of them had multiple facets. In short, I had a to-do list that was scores of items long that contributed to whether or not I would win a $4.1M contract and help a client. If I’m honest, it was a daunting undertaking.
But I’m happy to say I did it, and I did it successfully. I juggled all those items, completed them to satisfaction in that the client said my follow up is what won us the opportunity (vs the two other primary competitors), we signed the contract and basically I owe it all to my use of the tables feature in OneNote wherein one column was the to-do item, the next column was the requestor, and the third column were my running notes on where I was. First thing every single morning at 5:30am, while most of the world was still sleeping, I started running through that to-do list to make sure all my i’s were getting dotted and t’s were getting crossed and everything was moving forward schedule.
But that was then.
Now I don’t have a to do list.
Why?
Because life is too fast for a to do list.
It’s fast and it’s too overwhelming.
There are too many asks from too many sources and a modern-day expectation of instant turn-around times. (I remember a client asking for information in 1999 — I got it to her early the next morning and she said, “That was too fast! I thought it would take a week or so.” But in the 2020s I feel like everyone expects follow-up information not next week and not today but RIGHT FREAKIN’ NOW). So there is almost no point to a to-do list because by the time I jot the item down the requestor is already wanting it to be done.
So, instead I take notes, bold the key items as I type them in case I need to reference them later, and then get it done as soon as I possibly can, which is usually right now. If something is worth doing, it’s generally worth doing now. And so now is generally when I try to do it. If it’s important enough, and it takes more than a few moments to complete, then I’ll remember to do it, and if it’s not important enough to do right now or to remember that I need to do it (sort of like I don’t need to put down on my to-do list to pay a bill — paying bills is important enough that I’ll remember it). then maybe it shouldn’t be on a to-do list anyway.
It’s ironic that in an over-busy world a To-Do list has become almost outdated. Because if I take a few days to respond, then it’s probably too late, and if something has been promised and is important enough to promise, than I should do it now not tomorrow. So there just is no point to a to-do list.
So, when I’m asked what never gets done on my to-do list, I say this: nothing. Because there is nothing on my to-do list. If I’m being honest, I wish that weren’t true — it was a friendlier and less stressful world 25 years ago, when I had a notebook filled with my to do items and a week was acceptable except in case of major fires. But it is what it is, and all I can do is adapt to what is.
DISCLAIMER:
Every day wordpress issues a prompt and I’m finding myself enjoying answering that prompt. Today’s was: What is something on my to do list that never gets done.
No AI was used in the creation of this response. It is 100 percent organic which is why it isn’t all that great hahahah
Life, Work & Wonder 