03 | to-do lists as time travel
The pitfalls of planning, a WIP update, and what I'm up to in October
September has come and gone, which means it's high time for my annual rewatch of Over the Garden Wall. It also means that it's nearly Halloween, which means it's practically Thanksgiving, and then Christmas is a month away. 2023, that's basically a wrap.
Right?
Wait, what is that you're saying? There's actually a full quarter of the year left? Three whole months to take advantage of the quiet hours buried under holiday prep, appointments, and the day job?
It may not feel like it, but it's true. I've thought about this each year since hearing artist Austin Kleon gripe about people making "best of" lists before the end of the year. He points out that we can miss out on a lot by being prematurely retrospective, writing off that last chunk of time in which there are inevitably still great books to be read, movies to be watched, projects to be finished, etc.
I think I tend to fall into the opposite trap. The looming end of the year causes me to turn with enthusiasm to my bullet journal. There's nothing quite like turning a new page and making an ambitious to-do list so that even if I fall short by the deadline, I'm still further ahead than I was. And yet, I find sometimes that this zeal for completion can have its own pitfalls. There's the obvious risk of spending more time planning my life than actually living it. But it turns out there are others.
Allow me to digress for a minute. At my last job, I had a two-hour round-trip commute, which meant I listened to a lot of podcasts. That was ten years ago now, but I still remember a delightfully thoughtful and unexpectedly hilarious episode of This American Life where the producers interviewed people about whether or not they would choose to time travel, and why. It seemed that most people who said yes chose to travel to the past for reasons ranging from changing the course of history to fixing mistakes they'd made, to spending more time with a loved one they had lost. The hypothetical of the time machine was an opportunity to reflect on how they would spend their time, knowing what they do now.
I think of planning as doing the same thing with the future. What is goal-setting if not projecting ourselves to a future point at which we've accomplished all we set out to do? We write down all the things we have to do, and hopefully a few of the ones we want to do, and with the foolish ambition of someone stepping into a time machine, we say "Yeah, I think future me will have that done by the end of October."
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that when we plan, we project an idealistic future version of ourselves, too. No matter how many times I reach the end of a month with half my goals incomplete, I still face the new month believing that at some point I could become organized enough or disciplined enough or devoted enough to accomplish everything on that list. I usually don't think of the list itself as a problem - clearly, it's me.
Or, I didn't until I listened to an interview with Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. He also speaks about looking to the future when we plan, focusing mostly on the idea that by planning the future, we're often trying to control it:
“The real problem isn’t planning. It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t. What we forget, or can’t bear to confront, is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, “a plan is just a thought.” We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.”
Burkeman calls for an acceptance of reality, both in the amount of goals we can accomplish and the reasons we're choosing to prioritize them. Why are our lists so long? Are they full of things we should be doing, or things we actually value? How would we spend our time if we weren't so worried about those items coming to fruition?
I haven't thrown out my bullet journal, and I think I'll always want to stop and take stock of how I'm spending my time, what I want to accomplish, and how to prioritize for that. But maybe that idealistic future version of myself who has her stuff together isn't inherently more lovable or superior to the flawed and sometimes scattered version sitting here making the list. Maybe it doesn't take a time machine to recognize that at any given point, our list will be half-finished, and a lot of the good stuff that happens to us was never on there anyway.
Drafting update
So what am I hoping for in October, with all this talk of planning? My main focus is to continue drafting Project Alchemy, my stand-alone adult fantasy. In the last newsletter I talked about dealing with perfectionism in drafting by writing through to the end, and my methods for doing that. It turns out though, that sometimes writing through to the end of a draft requires stopping and revamping your outline so you can move forward. (Maybe there was something to that weird Matthew McConaughey Lincoln commercial after all.)
I think I'm still learning to embrace my discovery writer tendencies after believing for so long that I could know how a story was going to unfold because I'd outlined it. I'm going to continue to do what works to get the story down on paper, and try to finish by the end of the year. Even if the road has been a winding one, I'm enjoying building the world around my story and getting to know my characters better, and I think that's all I can ask for in a first draft.
October travels
The month is also full of a lot of travel, so I'm not going to pile on too much else while I'm taking in some vacation time and bookish events. In addition to a second trip to the Renaissance Faire, I'll be heading out on a road trip with my husband to view the annular eclipse visible in the American Southwest.
I'm also planning to attend the 9th annual Inklings Festival hosted in part by one of my favorite bookstores ever, Eighth Day Books. It’s a celebration of storytelling, beer, and music, as well as the reasons why we read and write fiction. Last year I got to meet and chat with fellow readers, podcasters, and fantasy authors in an environment that made me eager to return. This year's talks focus on C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers, and the event includes a walk to several local microbreweries with toasts to the writers who inspire us at each stop. I'm getting excited already!
What do you hope to do in the last quarter of this year? Let me know in the comments, whether it's a project or just some way you hope to savor the season.
Until next time, take care.