John Lennon said life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. For me, life is what happens when you’re busy making lists, and I have never once functioned without one.
I write these lists on white notebook paper, then clip the sheets to a clipboard. I also write my lists in an old-school black pleather seven-ring organizer I’ve carried for decades. I restock it every year with a new calendar and a fresh pack of list-lined refill pages. When I can’t see paper pages in the dark, I write lists at 2 a.m. in the Notes app on my phone, because the thought “buy my cat her favorite Bonkers treats” will not let me sleep until it has officially been put on the list. I then print out the note in the morning and transfer it to a piece of paper because notes on my phone just isn’t enough to keep me organized, or let’s call it what it really is, sane.
I’ve been like this since I was old enough to hold a pencil, and my cousins will testify to it, because they remember our childhood well. When one of them mentioned Toni and her clipboard, it made me sound kind of loony. Every Sunday, we all piled into our cars with our moms and dads and headed to the big white house in New Haven, Connecticut where our Italian Nonnie lived, for a massive Sunday dinner that consisted of macaroni (they didn’t call it pasta back then), meatballs, sausage, and at least two other dead animals, and enough sides and Italian pastries and cookies to set up a wedding banquet for seventy five.
And while every other cousin ran for the green grassy long hill of a yard set aside a large vegetable garden, I showed up with a clipboard and an agenda. My cousin told me that the cousins used to hide from me because I had the whole day already planned. It looked something like this: Noon to 1 pm: Roll down the hill in a race. 2 to 3 pm: Play pretend in the attic. 3 to 3:30 pm: Sneak into the second floor hallway and play-jump-off-the-balcony. 3:30 to 4 pm: Play tag. Nobody had elected me Sunday Activities Director, but I’ve always been one to take charge. I just decided, at age seven, that unscheduled fun was a risk I wasn’t willing to take.
I even added a schedule for myself and my Nonnie in there, asterisks included. 4 to 5:30 pm: Eat dinner and *get there early to grab a meatball with sauce and a piece of bread. 5:30 pm: Remind Nonnie to hand out the cookies and candy bars.
After I had kids, I added a new and exciting gadget to the clipboard: a timer. When my kids were small and the house needed cleaning, I set up a timer for each room and turned cleaning into a game. It was like a race. “Ten minutes, dining room, go,” and suddenly my two kids were sprinting around like it was a game show, because a timer turns a chore into a competition, and nobody has ever once been able to resist a countdown, especially me. Clean house, no whining, and everybody thinks it was fun. My framework should be studied for books on parenting your kids into organized individuals. If I examine my adult kids, I notice that my daughter has lists all over the place but completing the tasks on time stresses her out. I wonder why. But my son? Totally organized. For him, it’s Excel documents. I take some credit for this.
And the list making has never left. It just grew up with me. Today its pages hold the entire range of my life with zero regard for hierarchy: shower, wash hair or make an appointment with Aliza for a blow dry; write syllabus; schedule mammogram; call my sister; buy Ani DiFranco tickets; find a shoe repair; check Kayak for discount business class tickets; contact cousin about Hamilton tickets. The list goes on and on.
For years I thought this was just a personality setting, like being someone who has to sleep with the closet door shut. (I do). It seemed harmless, and maybe a little intense, but looking back, I think the list started as something with higher stakes than a to-do.
I grew up in a house where the plans were never mine. We moved constantly, and not the good kind of moving where your dad gets a promotion and you get a bigger yard. For us, it was the kind where you came home from school and there were already boxes because your father had used up another town, or gotten into trouble with the cops, or the feds, or all three, and none of it had anything to do with a vote. Nobody, except maybe our mother, knew in advance what the plan was, and if there was one, it belonged to him, and it usually meant leaving in the middle of the night.
The list making, and checking off everything on it, calmed me. It still does. It makes me feel like my life is in order. Sometimes the time allotted is not enough for a task on the list, so I rewrite the times. Lots of crossing out, but for my organizer, I have another best friend: Wite-Out. I have a year supply of these small bottles, and the pages of my organizer paint a crazier picture than the words on them. I can’t stand to see things crossed out on these lovely, clean slate pages, so I use Wite-Out to erase a mistake, or a task put on the wrong day, or a change of plans. I blob that white sticky stuff all over the error, remove the page from the rings that hold it, and sit and fan the page until it dries. It doesn’t always dry, so there are a few pages that stick together, which results in me having to pull them apart which pulls off some of the paper. This makes it visually unacceptable, and also not a problem because I keep a backup calendar insert for emergencies. As I write this, I realize how crazy this sounds.
*Note: Add to list: Purchase 2027 calendar, inserts, list pages, Wite-Out.
I should add that there’s a specific moment at the end of every year that makes my body shudder with actual dread: adding the new year’s blank calendar pages into the organizer. I look at those pages and see a combination of possibility and dread. What will end up written there? Vacations or funerals? Coffee dates or chemo appointments? Or will I die before the year’s even over, leaving behind a notebook full of blank pages, the ultimate unfinished list?”
The clipboard at Nonnie’s was never really about a play date schedule. It was about the fact that I could decide what happened at one o’clock, and it would actually happen. Nobody was coming to change it. A list was the one square inch of my whole chaotic childhood where I got to be in charge of something, even if that something was suspiciously overlapping a sixty minute game of tag itinerary for a bunch of eight year olds who mostly just wanted a snack.
My life now is stable in ways it wasn’t back then. Nobody’s leaving town. Nobody’s showing up asking where my father is. And still, every single morning, there’s the list, showering and washing my hair wedged in next to write recommendation letter for student and call my sister. It’s just another task, and also a small daily ritual of proving to myself that the day will hold still. I’ve made peace with never being someone who trusts a day to behave on its own. I will always want it in writing.
So no, John, life isn’t what happens when you’re busy making other plans. For me, it’s really about what happens in the parts that never made it onto the list at all. That part, the part that stays in my head instead of on paper, is what keeps me up at night. The things I’m too afraid to put in writing like: add to our will’s final instructions music list to be played at my funeral,” Radiohead’s Videotape.”
Which just gave me another morbid list item. Date and time unknown: Take last breath. That thought alone makes me want to throw away my lists, or throw up.
Quick. Get the Wite-Out.