I Will Never Get It All Done

A post Spring Break liberation essay

I’m stumbling back into writing after a two week hiatus.

My first week away, I spent Spring Break in Florida, soaking up every precious drop of sunshine and boogie-boarding with our kids. I can still feel a distant surge of joy remembering each sandy moment I pushed up after an effortless ride to shore. Ahhhh…

The following week, back in cold, gray Ohio, I faced one of the most difficult post–Spring Break re-entries I can remember. I felt like a child savoring a popsicle in the heat of summer, only to have it slip from the stick and melt into the concrete, beyond saving.

One glorious detail I loved leaving behind was my weekly to-do list. I awoke each day in Florida and allowed the day to have its way with me, the same way I allowed the ocean waves to carry me on my boogie board.

In fact, making our weekly family calendar and Monday to-do list was the starting point of a steep downward spiral into my first week home.

After that decline into a rather shitty week, I have a new perspective - I’m genuinely unsure whether making a to-do list is helpful or masochistic.

I love planning and I’m decent at it. The problem is, once I make my weekly to-do list, I feel like a runner at the starting gun of a race I can never finish.

The to-dos never go away. There’s always something that needs my attention. And as time marches on through the week, more tasks find me.

• A dentist appointment because my filling cracked and flaked as I was flossing before bed.

• A school email that somehow requires three logins and a PDF upload.

• An Amazon return jostling around in my front seat.

• A group text thread I haven’t responded to that keeps growing and nudging me.

• A “quick” work task that becomes an unexpected project.

I know I cannot be on perpetual vacation. I’m a middle aged woman living in the time-space continuum of working motherhood. But isn’t there something I can do (or not do)?

One option to resolve this conundrum is to stop making my weekly to-do list. I have tried that. I don’t even want to talk about the disaster. At this stage of life, if it doesn’t get written down, it has zero chance of actually getting done.

If I’m going to continue to have a list, I’ve come to realize my only option for sanity is to change how I hold the list in my psyche.

Before I go on, let me divulge what it feels like on the inside to have undone tasks.

Behind.
Frantic.
Frenetic.
Overloaded.
Overwhelmed.
Unable to fully exhale.

Can you relate?

It’s a perpetual weighted vest but not the kind that’s touted for longevity. (In fact, I think it’s negating any positive impact wearing my weighted vest is getting me).

The other day my fiancé Jon explained that he once heard a podcast of a high powered CEO explaining that at any given time he has hundreds of tasks that need his attention, and that he succumbs to the fact that he’s never going to get through them all. As a leader himself, Jon said he has kept that in mind ever since.

Why am I not more like this man?

And how did I get this way?!

I think it was years of school assignments I diligently completed for the grade, for the honor roll, for admission into college. Every task led to a finished class, a predictable and finite result. From Kindergarten through two Master’s degrees—slow roasted to perfection.

Life does not work this way. And yet, somewhere along the line, I internalized the expectation that it should—that if I just stayed focused, stayed disciplined, stayed on top of things, I would eventually reach the end of the list and feel done.

But there is no end. There is only more life.

I think I might re-phrase this as ‘forging a healthy relationship with productivity.’ (Should I add it to my to-do list?)

This newfound relationship starts with knowing one thing deeply—I am not what I do. I’ve heard that sentiment for years, but it’s never fully landed. It orbits around me like the Earth around the Sun, pulling at my energy without ever quite becoming something I can stand inside of.

Of late, one way I’ve begun to feel more at peace with this is recognizing that I am a child of God. I am here because He put me here. And everything that is in my life is here for a reason, even the undone to-dos.

Especially the undone to-dos, because they’re where my conditioning meets the reality of a life that cannot be completed.

What I am beginning to see is that the tension I feel has far less to do with the list itself and everything to do with the belief that I am supposed to finish it.

There is no finish line. There is only a life that continues to ask for my attention, whether or not I ever catch up to it.

So the practice is not to conquer the list, but to become someone who can remain steady in the presence of what will remain unfinished.

This morning, my to-do list is exactly as I left it—full, unfinished, quietly accumulating—and yet I’m experimenting with the possibility that nothing has gone wrong.

That I am not behind, but alive inside of a life that does not begin and end with my to-do list.

The waves are different out here now. They look like endless emails, errands, and unfinished tasks—rocky in their own way.

But the invitation is the same—not to outrun them, but to let them carry me, even if I never reach the shore.