The To-Do List Tyranny
A recent viral tweet about a tech investor using Notion to “manage” his marriage reminded me of the oft-felt impulse to throw away my (many) to-do lists.
(Vincent Van Gogh, The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, 1888)
To-do lists govern my life. Expectedly, I have to-do lists for work, writing, and personal finance. Perhaps not so expectedly, also for fitness, self-care, love, health, and um, relaxation. Versions of my to-do lists exist on different devices like the digital equivalent of grabbing a paper napkin. The tasks vary from the obviously insignificant (“wash your hair”) to the more abstract (“be happy.”)
All this to say, that when a tweet by tech investor Ben Lang on how he and his wife use Notion to “organise” their marriage went viral on X (formerly Twitter), I felt both seen and terrified.
A part of me respected Ben’s game. This was the Ultimate To-Do List. The reward at the end of the “optimise your life” rainbow. And honestly, this wasn’t much different from what my — and my friends’ life — looked like. If you’re putting a date night on your Google Calendar, or sending a Zoom link to your long-distance friend, then surely, having a Notion where you log your hopes for the future isn’t an exception.
For better or for worse — though I often think it’s the latter — we live in a world that assigns worth to a human life based on the life’s productivity. Wasting time is the ultimate sin in an era where everyone is hustling. What is it exactly that we are doing with our brains once we are outsourcing the everyday business of living is anyone’s guess, but we certainly are doing more and more of that. So, is it really so wrong to go one step ahead and outsource “important things we have learnt about each other” in a relationship to a productivity tool?
Yes, Maanvi, yes. The smart-ass voice in my head replied to that previous sentence even as I was writing it. The joy of living is in the mess of it. I have never remembered the birthday of one of my oldest friends because I am terrible at remembering dates, and every year he makes fun of me for it, but isn’t that what the joy of accepting people for who they are is all about? A vision of future-Maanvi, that needs a productivity tool with the heading “Principles” to remember…what her principles were, is terrifying.
The reason Ben’s tweet hit me hard beyond my usual check-in on the e-Lafda of the Day was that it was a reality check. It made me realise just how much of our experience of life was being mediated by an expectation that it must go along a fixed trajectory. In making to-do lists, I was deliberately swatting away at the chaos, the entropy, that makes us and the Universe what it is. If how we live our days add up to how we live our life, and if we heavily regulate our days to ensure that we are constantly moving ahead, then how the hell will we ever move sideways? How will we ever wander?
This week, I was re-reading “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” One of the side-effects of studying literature in your undergrad is that you have fragments of lines of poems, novels, and plays waft upon you at the weirdest times. In this instance, I was stuck in traffic in the city and thinking of Prufrock measuring his life in coffee spoons. Since the traffic was stubbornly unmoving, I decided to revisit the poem. And the line that made me gasp was a different one.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table
I gasped because I realised it had been a while since I had seen a night (or day) stretch out against the sky, with no fixed stars of tasks-to-do disrupting the fabric. So thanks to Ben’s Notion document — and TS Eliot — I have taken baby steps to free myself of the tyranny of the to-do list. I’ve deleted my personal to-do list on at least one device. The weekend meandered its way to Sunday evening without any major tick-boxes. This newsletter is not the one I had been planning the whole week. It’s an impulse-send.
Present-scene — I am sitting in a cafe, writing this dispatch, gobbling a cookie with two googly-eyes, and eavesdropping on a couple on a date. The to-do list will be back to anchor me through the work week, and I am grateful for it. But, that’s tomorrow.
For now, like a dude called Prufrock once said — this evening is spread out against the sky.
Hello, hello - I hope you’re doing well. If you’ve liked what you read, share it with your Notion-loving friend. And reply to this email and let me know what you think — whenever you can. :)
I will write again, soon.
When I saw the notification of a 2nd substack from you within the span of 2 weeks, I knew it was an impulse post. Thank God for beautiful poems and ultra-organized Tech investors, for we got to read another post from Maanvi in such a short span of time.
Love your work, as always! ✨💓