Accord­ing to my Omni­Fo­cus data­base, I have 1,272 active to do items span­ning 197 projects and 93 zip files. Their due dates range from tomor­row to retire­ment. Every day, I open Omni­Fo­cus and it tells me what to do today, so I don’t have to worry about tomor­row. And yet, I have this nag­ging feel­ing of dis­so­ci­a­tion from the present. I think past me plan­ning for future me has left present me with noth­ing to do.

Case in point: last Fri­day was a mis­cel­la­neous day, where I take all of those to dos that I pushed off from the past cou­ple of weeks and got them done. I had a nice tidy list of 17 of of them, each with care­fully cho­sen dead­lines and terse, but effec­tive notes remind­ing me what I was doing when I last worked on it, why it was impor­tant, and what was left to fin­ish. I spent the day fir­ing off e-mails, edit­ing stale para­graphs in paper sub­mis­sions, sub­mit­ting travel forms, plan­ning grant spend­ing, set­ting up Trac for my class in the fall. Yet by the end of the day, I wasn’t really sure what I’d accom­plished. When the girl­friend asked me about the high­lights of my day, I was at a com­plete loss. What had I done? Was any of it fun? Was it frus­trat­ing? Were there any mem­o­rable moments at all? At least to my con­scious self, it felt like I’d really only done one thing that day: clear my to do list. The rest was a blur. Past me had present me so pre­pared to mech­a­nis­ti­cally work through those 17 items, I hadn’t even formed mem­o­ries of the work I’d done or the emo­tions I felt. I was a to do bot whose sole mis­sion was plac­ing check­marks on a vir­tual list, all in ser­vice of future me’s ever grow­ing workload.

Now that I reflect on this, I think what’s going on is that I’ve sep­a­rated all of the think­ing and decid­ing about what I should be doing now from the now itself. At least at work, I rarely find a moment where decid­ing what to do and actu­ally doing it co-occur in any mean­ing­ful way. This is never clearer than on the week­ends, where I try to let present me make the deci­sions, instead of past me. Past me had noth­ing to say about brunch this morn­ing, he didn’t give me a list of chores. It was present me who got to play with my 16 wak­ing hours and decide how to break them down, how to fill them, and when the day was done. And being so involved in decid­ing about today has led to so many won­der­ful mem­o­ries: the arugula hol­landaise risotto bene­dict, the peach dutch baby pan­cakes, writ­ing this blog post at Uptown Espresso in the Bell­town sun­shine with my girl­friend. Aren’t these the kind of mem­o­ries and expe­ri­ences that life is about?

I sup­pose it’s a trade­off, like any­thing else. What’s more impor­tant at work, get­ting things done or remem­ber­ing get­ting things done? I like my job, or at least I like the idea of it, but lately my obses­sion with effi­ciency is trans­form­ing work that used to be so sat­is­fy­ing into a hazy blur of typ­ing and talk­ing. To com­bat this, maybe I’ll try insert­ing lit­tle moments of reflec­tion into my day, where I sit and reflect for 5 min­utes and maybe write a bit, just to crys­tal­lize the con­crete in my mind. In fact, I’ll add it to my to do list right now!