[From The Connection Cure archive — originally published in 2022]

Recently I realized how I’ve turned everything into a to-do list. 

Like Big Post-It had hoped, I’m prolific in the pen-and-paper ones: color-coded sticky notes strewn around my desk, with scribbles to renew my passport and purge my Google Drive and look up how NFTs actually work.

But most concerning are the “lists” I’ve projected everywhere else. 

My texts— intentionally-unopened reminders to find time for drinks with Kat or lunch with Ryan. 

My inbox—never-yet-read newsletters, hasty “dont-forget-to-X” messages from:me, to:me. 

My web browser— dozens of dormant tabs for tofu recipes and tub cleaning hacks.

My iPhone notes— daily, time-stamped tasks that ritually, inevitably, get copy-and-pasted from one day to the next. 

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Pretty much everyone, it seems, has a similarly endless to-do-list. It’s the creeping undertone of every “I’m running late” or “I have to leave early” text. It’s the mental Tetris game we play every Saturday—when we try to squeeze in three birthdays, two catch-up calls, a CrossFit class and a grocery haul during That One Magic Hour there’s no line at Trader Joe’s. 

And still, pretty much everyone wishes they had a little bit more time for their to-do-ing. For me, I dream about having 2 free days, or even 2 hours, to tackle my to-do-lists, like weedwacker taking to an overgrown field. What will I do when I finish?, I wonder, conjuring images of reading by candlelight or idle walks along the water. 

But then, when I look back on the rare instances when this has happened—when I’ve crossed off a sizable chunk of to-dos, I come to an uninspiring answer: I’d fill it with more stuff, of course. 

Just as weeds grow back faster and fuller when you cut them, so do to-do-lists. 

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Back in 1866, an economist named William Stanley Jevons drew attention to this paradox, after an engineer named James Watt invented a more fuel-efficient steam engine. 

Because Watt’s engine used less coal than others, economists thought his invention (hack!) would help coal consumption go down.

But actually, that was the problem; because Watt’s steam engine was more efficient —it took trains and boats less coal to travel the same distance than it did with other engines— coal use became cheaper. And so, his engine created a market for more trains. More boats. More routes going to more places.  So many, Jevons calculated, that Watt’s invention increased the world’s total coal consumption. 

About a hundred years after Jevons, a psychologist named Cyril Northcote Parkinson made a similar observation. He’d been studying the expansion of the British government in the mid-twentieth century.  Each year, he noticed, the government created new positions, and, then, more new positions (“subordinates”) for the old new positions to manage. But that wasn’t because Britain suddenly had more work to do (in fact, with their empire dwindling, they had less); instead, it had to do with our human impulse to create work for ourselves. So long as there is time—he said, in what’s now known as Parkinson’s Law—we will always find work to fill that time. 

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During my particularly batty spells of to-do-ing— like hard boiling eggs by-the-dozen or painting my nails while I wait for the G train— I laugh, wondering what the cavemen would say if they could see this little Sissyphyian chase for more hours in the day; if they could witness the whole market we’ve created for time-saving and errand-slashing: One-hour-delivery and meal-prep boxes.  Pomodoro timers and pen-and-paper planners. Frozen dinners and Task Rabbits. 

Of course, you’d rightly point out, the cavemen can’t relate, because, besides eating Paleo and chilling in the cave, there wasn’t a whole lot for them to do. It’s a blessing, you’ll counter, to live in a world with abundant opportunity, with no time to be bored or sit still.

And you’d be right. We to-do because we there’s so much to do; because we’re curious and ambitious and want to be the most well-lived versions of ourselves. 

But yet, I think, we also fixate on the ‘doing’ because it’s a lot easier than ‘not doing’. Because making and then tackling to-do-lists is our way of exercising control over a world that seems to lack it. To-do listing, maybe,  is how we cope with societal violence, racism, climate change, government corruption-- forces the cavemen probably didn’t have to deal with; we may not be able to stop the decline of democracy, but at least we mailed those thank you notes.  

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We now have a whole glossary of terms to describe the uneasiness of an unfinished to-do list: FOMO. Sunday scaries. “Fall anxiety,” as an article recently described of the mid-August blues we feel when we think of the trips not-taken, summer reads not-read, plans not-executed. 

But we also have many millennia’s worth of literature and philosophy and science suggesting that this feeling—of wishing we’d done more— is kind of a scam in the grand scheme. How, instead, our truest joy comes not from a packed-calendar, but from the simple, focused moments within it.  

When the frenetic temptations to to-do-list strikes, it helps to picture 90-year-old-me realizing this; how I’ll be OK with never understanding NFTs and not cleaning my potentially Tetanus-lined bathtub if it means more time on less; the pizza crawls and park picnics and ‘til-2am phone calls. The spontaneous stuff that could have never come out of a to-do list. The contents of what a “well-lived” life really is. 

A friend recently told me over coffee, “Busy a decision,” and the opposite is also true: not being busy is a decision. Which is why, scribbled on Post-its and self-sent texts and emails, you’ll find just one item left on my to-do list: stop making them.