The To-Do List (5 page)

John-boy

Which was quickly followed by this one from Nadine:

Mikey babe!

Are you mad? A 1,277-item To-Do List! I hope Item 344 is: ‘Nip down to London and have lunch with Nadine as I haven’t seen her in ages?’ It better had be!

Best of luck!

Nx

Which was followed by this one from Chris:

1,277 things! You’ve got no chance! Let’s meet up for a beer sometime to discuss!

See you soon.

Chris

Message after message pinged into my in-box. It was great. Everyone knew what I was doing. There really was no backing out, even if I’d wanted to, which of course I didn’t. So in the spirit of doing things now rather than later I decided to tackle Item 173: ‘Sort out garden because it’s a jungle out there’.

Having donned my green parka, army surplus hat and old trainers, I opened the back door and peered outside at the patio. It was covered in a thick carpet of leaves from the huge oak tree at the side of the house. Despite my strenuously wishing that they would magically disappear they had remained in situ, mocking my lack of gardening skills for some time now.

       
I ventured down to the bottom of the garden and opened my shed (like me, it had seen better days) and rummaged around for the rake (a wedding present from my parents).

       
Looking at the sheer volume of leaves (you couldn’t see any of the blue brick patio at all) and factoring in the leaf fall on the garden itself (three times the size of the patio) I concluded I had the wrong tool for the job. Okay, it was a rake of sorts but it clearly wasn’t designed for heavy-duty leaf clearance. On a recent drive to town I had passed a couple of council workmen and briefly admired their huge leaf-retrieval system that looked like a pair of broom handles with scoops at the end. That was exactly what I needed and as the wind began to blow, swirling the leaves at my feet and making my eyes water, I decided that a trip to B&Q was in order.

       
Even though my local B&Q was relatively quiet it still took me the best part of three quarters of an hour to make it out of the store. This had less to do with leaf-picking-up devices (I managed to pick up one called ‘Big Green Hands’, that looked like a huge pair of plastic claws) and had more to do with the fact that I got distracted.

       
There’s something incredibly comforting about DIY stores. I like the way they’re set out in aisles that you can wander up and down, I like the way that you can rarely tell what the weather’s doing once you’re inside but most of all I like the fact that they are filled with a hundred and one solutions to everyday problems and though I had 1,277 pressing problems, I couldn’t resist a few solutions to problems that I didn’t have yet which explains why, along with my ‘Big Green hands’, I left the store with two tubes of No More Nails, a scart plug, two bedside lamps, a device for detecting electrical cables behind walls, two packs of discounted Christmas baubles and a new set of Christmas lights, a cork notice board and a mini potted palm. I didn’t actually do any gardening that day because by the time I reached home it had started to rain.

This haphazard, start-a-million-different-projects-but-finish-none-of-them attitude continued not just through the first day of the To-Do List, but through the first week and well into the second. But it wasn’t until the beginning of the third week as Claire and I sat down after putting Lydia to bed, that I finally admitted that perhaps Claire had made a good point about the necessity of a plan.

       
‘So how are you getting on with that List of yours?’ This was the first reference that she had made to the List since she’d reminded me of the Tile-Painting Incident.

       
‘Not great,’ I confessed. ‘Today I thought about learning Italian, I got a few tools out of the shed, I bought a load more stuff from B&Q that I neither needed nor wanted, I half wrote a letter to my Uncle Churchill in Jamaica whom I haven’t seen in thirty-odd years and I’m getting a bit sick of the fact that the loft still looks like a tip since my attempt to clear out the under-eaves space. It’s been a great couple of weeks for procrastination but not a brilliant one for getting things done. Okay, I admit it. You were right, I was wrong. There is no way that I’ll be able to keep this up if I don’t come up with a plan to fool myself into staying on course, so I’ve made a couple of decisions.’

       
‘Like what?’

       
‘Well, the first is that I’m not going to do anything more today, tomorrow, or for the rest of the week.’

       
‘So, some kind of less-is-more philosophy?’ joked Claire. ‘Let me know if it works!’

       
‘No.’ I narrowed my eyes in mock menace. ‘I do need a plan and I think I’ve finally got one.’

       
‘Which is?’

       
‘To take it one step at a time.’

       
‘And your first step is  . . .?’

       
‘Get some expert advice.’

       
‘From whom?’

       
‘Well, that’s the genius part,’ I said, tapping the side of my nose in a knowing fashion. ‘I’m planning to get my expert advice from the best in the business.’

       
‘What business would that be?’

       
‘The time business,’ I replied. ‘I’m going to get me some face time with a genuine Time Management guru.’

Chapter 5: ‘Get some advice from people who know what they’re talking about.’

A couple of years ago, around the time I was turning thirty, I had a few moments similar to my current To-Do-List obsession when I thought I should sort my life out. I can see now it was the whole turning thirty ‘Where am I going? Where have I been? Where am I right now?’ thing but at the time it seemed like the moment to get myself organised.

       
My first step was to head for the shops in the hope that purchasing useful things would miraculously change my life. This was a daft theory and one all too well understood by those who churn out work-out DVDs in January. Just as my wife purchasing Davina McCall’s
Power of Three
work-out DVD and leaving it gathering dust on the shelf didn’t help anyone but Davina McCall, buying Mark Forster’s book
Get Everything Done and Still Have Time To Play
, reading the first two chapters and then not going back to it because (irony of ironies) I couldn’t find the time, doesn’t help anyone but Mark Forster.

       
Luckily I didn’t take Forster’s book to Oxfam along with Claire’s Davina DVDs and her
Mr Motivator
box set, but retained it for use in possible future emergencies just like this one. But of course I had to find it first.

       
I began the search in the living room because that’s where we keep most of our books. Like many young couples who prefer people not to think they spend their evenings watching property programmes or yelling at the characters on
EastEnders
, we owned a lot of books that we liked to keep on display. There were upwards of a couple of hundred of them in the living room alone and others scattered at various locations around the house. The clever-clever stuff (Zola, Dickens, Carver, etc.) and feminist stuff belonged solely to Claire; the occasional smart modern stuff (Smith, Amis, Eggers, etc.) along with the stuff that seemed more than a little bit random (an original copy of
Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask
,
The Collected Andy Capp
and
Gary Wilmot’s Guide to Doing Impressions
) were mine; and finally the
Lonely Planet
and
Rough Guides
that gave the impression we were a well-travelled cosmopolitan couple (South Africa, Russia, Crete, Thailand and the USA) were jointly ours.

       
The problem with this many books was that if you wanted a specific tome and hadn’t organised them into some kind of order (Item 818. ‘Organise book shelves so that you can find a specific book without looking through everything’) you were pretty much stuffed.

       
I started with the main shelf above the stereo but it wasn’t there nor on the ones by the French doors; I checked the three IKEA shelves in our bedroom but it wasn’t there nor in Lydia’s room (she had been known to pluck a random book off the shelf in order to spend an entire afternoon pretending that she was reading
The Collected Works of Aphra Behn
); finally I headed up to the office/spare room and checked out the books stacked against the wall by the sofa bed and the ones piled on the wonky IKEA Lack shelving. No luck. About to give up, I racked my brains to remember where I’d had it last and began to see disconnected images of me in a tidying frenzy some months earlier when I’d grabbed a bunch of stuff that had been sitting on the floor at my feet and tossed it into a box before ceremonially dumping it in . . .
the under-eaves storage space
.

       
Twenty minutes later with half of the contents of the storage cupboard once again strewn around the room, I finally found what I was looking for.

       
‘Time is what our lives are made of’, said the blurb on the back of the book, ‘and yet our failure to use time properly can have disastrous effects on our happiness and sense of well-being. This book is written for everyone who has to juggle different demands in a busy schedule, including advice on finding an effective system while making allowances for human psychology and the unexpected.’

       
It was hard to believe how right this book was for me given my situation. I called Claire upstairs and read her the blurb.

       
‘
Get Everything Done
is a book written for everyone who has to juggle different demands in a busy schedule,’ I said pointing to the relevant part of the blurb. ‘See that? A book for me.’

       
‘That’s great,’ said Claire. ‘Now all you have to do is read it.’

       
Good point. This book was only going to work for me if I actually read it but I hadn’t got the time to read it so I was a bit stuck.

       
I woke up my computer and typed Mark Forster’s name into Google hoping to find an audio version of
Get Everything Done
so I could multi task. Instead I found something far more useful: the author’s email address. Within minutes I was composing a message to him:

Dear Mr Forster

My name’s Mike Gayle and I’ve got a list of 1,277 things I need to do before my next birthday. I was wondering whether you might be free at some point quite soon to have a chat in person about what I’m attempting to do.

Cheers

Mike Gayle

‘Do you think he’ll reply?’ Claire was reading the message over my shoulder.

       
‘I’m hoping so.’ I turned over the book and examined his author photo. He looked cheery, the sort of man that you’d definitely trust with your car keys. ‘He certainly looks like the sort of man who would write back.’

       
‘So, are you going to carry on with the List in the meantime?’

       
‘No way. I’m on a roll so my plan is to use my time wisely and head off right now for a chat with another, more local, expert but one whose field is more organisational. And I’ll give you a clue: she’s Canadian, married with two kids under three, and easily, hands down, the most organised person we know.’

It was just after eight by the time I arrived at Alexa’s. After ushering me into her front room, she headed off to get us some coffee while I looked around, wearing different eyes from the ones I had worn here on previous occasions. Suddenly everything spoke of Alexa’s organisational skills. The books were all in alphabetical order with the bottom shelf reserved for oversized books. I wondered idly if Alexa (whose postgraduate degree had been in Librarianship) had also made miniature library tickets for them all; on the table next to the sofa, fanned out in a decorative fashion that you might find in an upmarket hairdressers, were half a dozen magazines:
Martha Stewart’s Living
, Oprah Winfrey’s
O, Canadian Living
,
Canadian Interiors
,
Patchwork Monthly
and
Red
; in the corner of the room were three pairs of shoes all lined up in ascending size from left to right. This was a woman who knew about being organised. This was a woman who would definitely be able to assist me on my mission to conquer the List.

‘So come on then,’ she said, cradling her coffee as she leaned back in her armchair. ‘You were very cryptic on the phone. What exactly can I do to help you?’

       
‘Well, you know that list? The one with the 1,277 things on it? Well, I’ve sort of run into trouble and I need advice about how to be organised and given that you’re the most organised person I know  . . .’

       
‘I wouldn’t say that exactly  . . .’

       
‘I would. I bet if I went into your loft right now I wouldn’t find half a cast-iron fireplace, would I?’

       
‘No, you wouldn’t,’ replied Alexa, baffled. ‘Would I find one in yours?’

       
I raised my eyebrows in a show of guilt. ‘All I’m trying to demonstrate is that you’re organised. I bet you even know exactly where your birth certificate is.’