by Vani Viswanathan
What theme are you addressing in your piece? Why is this important to you?
Vani Viswanathan: In a world of unpredictability, I talk about how I find it important – and joyful – to be organised. At the risk of going a little overboard, I go through lists in various forms, shapes and mediums. But there is a downside if this goes unchecked, especially in a world where you see people around you who seem to have everything under control and are constantly only getting better at what they do. I talk about what organising has helped me with, and what I have learnt from the process.
I walk quickly, wary of the three dogs eyeing me as if I’m food. One dog suddenly jerks and I yelp, but it’s a false alarm: the dog doesn’t want anything. I walk away as fast as I can, relieved to have escaped them.
But my joy is short-lived. My circular route brings me back to the same place again, and I have to walk past the dogs again, for at least another three times.
You see, I’m trying to finish my quota of steps for the day, and this path is the only one that is lit late at night, which is when I got the time to get out to walk. I’m part of a Fitbit challenge and I can’t lose pathetically when my nearest ‘competitor’ averages some 6,000 steps more than me.
Welcome to the club of tracking everything you do, of which I’m an irregular but well-meaning member.
In the average day/month/year, here’s a list of all the things I keep track of:
- To-dos for the day
- When I wake up and go to bed
- The number of glasses of water I drink
- Pain in the body and what I ate or did that could have caused it
- Exercise – did I walk or run (if so, how many steps did I hit?) or do yoga?
- The number of books I read
- Appointments for haircuts and dentists
- Readership stats for my website
- Things to write about or tweet about
- Books, songs and podcasts to check out
- News useful for my development communication work
And to track these, here are the methods I use: list-making apps on the phone, Evernote, a bullet journal, my phone’s alarm and reminder service, Goodreads, Fitbit, WordPress, Podcast Addict, and a little notebook that is in my bag all the time.
I’m pleased with my sense of being organised. I feel like things are under control, that I have a holistic tracking system that covers work and personal life, and personal improvement. I take explicit joy in this process and am forever looking for new methods to be organised, to be productive and derive more out of the 16 hours I spend awake each day. This includes ensuring that I have time to do nothing too, for I genuinely believe in do-nothing-space-out time. I simply love being planned. Let me give you an example of how this pans out.
On Fridays, my work-from-home days, I sit down at 8 am to draw a list of things to do for the weekend. I find this task exhilarating: I have three glorious days ahead of me! Everything goes into that list: from finishing work, to going for yoga or a run, to meeting people, to cleaning things around the house, to catching a blissful nap, to buying groceries, to enjoying a relaxed beer to checking how my investments are doing. The list is organised by day, and sometimes by categories (‘house stuff’, ‘finances’, ‘exercise’ and so on). A few of these tasks are also added on my phone as reminders.
I sit back to survey the list, brimming with happiness at the idea of three productive days, and at my efficiency in capturing the breadth of tasks effectively.
The problem, however, is that I forget the list exists, literally. As the Friday and the weekend roll by, the days have their own plans: I get sucked into a cleaning activity when I’m supposed to check bank accounts, or I get waylaid into watching some old Tamil movie. A last-minute dinner plan means yoga the next morning doesn’t happen. The result? I remember the list again on Sunday evening and look dismally at the grand plans that have simmered into a whimper. I strike off items that I managed to get to, trying to gather some solace, but the tasks I didn’t get to seem to laugh at me. ‘Transfer files from old laptop and dispose of it’ has been sitting in my list for a few weeks now, like an unwelcome squatter who refuses to vacate.
None of this deters me, though. On Sunday night, I make another list for the week. I’m nothing if not a vessel of optimism.
How did this madness begin, you ask? I suppose I’ve always been that way. I like rules that make life safer and simpler. I like to follow rules and I get irritated when I or people around me don’t follow them. Living in Singapore – and working in the chaotic field of public relations – only cemented this: I grew to love ways to keep myself organised, be it at work or in personal life. Upon returning to India, I was disarmed by the chaos that reigned at home, at work and everywhere in between. In the face of unpredictability, I began to seek refuge in being organised. With the coming of social media and smartphones, I began to look for new apps and tactics. Exploring new ways to organise a shelf, map out my tasks for the day or discover new things, be it books, articles or music, gets me really excited. And if I may be modest, I walk the talk too, for the most part. I make and tick off things on my list regularly. My home and my shelves may not look the neatest, but I know exactly where to find my things. If a missing object isn’t found in five minutes – after I’ve looked at places I know it will be – you can be sure that it’s lost.
I am an organisation junkie and I love being one. Life is nice when you know you can depend on yourself to get things done.
All the same, it does get exhausting. The pressure to be better and do more is high, especially thanks to social media. Because all over, I find people doing wonderful things. Exercising regularly. Reading many (and diverse) books. Travelling to exotic places and writing about it. Discovering hidden corners in the city. Writing poetry everyday. Binge-watching TV series. Cooking something new every week. Sketching or painting regularly.
Now I can’t be all – or most – of these things. Sure enough, I read, write, travel and exercise, but none of it with this alarming regularity. I felt mighty pleased with reading 25 books last year until I saw people who read over 50. That’s at least one book a week! How on earth did they find time for that? I go on Pinterest to drool over bullet journal layouts to apply in my own, but my lines aren’t straight or as beautifully curved as they’re supposed to be, and that large word I’ve written in cursive, imitating a Pinterest user, tapers horribly. It takes me weeks to write about or share pictures from a wonderful vacation. Fairly often, I forget that I’ve made lists of news articles, books or songs, and waste time looking for them all over again. On quite a few days I do miserably on most things I’m supposed to track. I usually brush it off and move on, but if this happens for days together, I feel discouraged. For in this world that seems to have got its act together, I seem to be stumbling through with to-do lists and tracking methods, trying to get some order into life. I felt equally encouraged and pressured by these people who seemed to be having it all. Yes, I know that if I look hard enough I will see enough people ambling through life, but I wonder if they are okay with it (if so, I’m genuinely happy for them!); all I know is I want more control over life.
Life, obviously, doesn’t work that way. My biggest learning came about last year, when I had health crises that I would have never thought would happen to me given my controlled habits and general good health. Life suddenly changed course and I found myself tumbling into anarchy, questioning over and over why this happened. Luckily, I could recover reasonably quickly, and that meant I started trying to gain control over my day and my time. It seemed to go well enough, even though I struggled with how my body had changed and would need time to get back to old ways.
This chain of events helped me come to a realisation. That I needed to be kinder to myself. It’s wonderful to be organised, but it’s also nice to let go; all that obsessive control and organisation didn’t matter when I landed up in the hospital. Granted, like a friend pointed out, it helped me recover well, but there is no point stressing so much about it. Life happens and sometimes you can’t meet your mini-goals for the day/week/month. There will always be people doing more and doing better than me, and I have to learn to accept it.
The fan that I am of being organised, I can never be completely off planning, detailing and implementing. Heck, I installed an app for the Pomodoro focusing technique minutes before writing this. I can only try to not let failures matter so much. To try to do better, but to smile – or sigh – and let go.
