Scientific Evidence to Explain Why To-Do Lists Fail

A new scientific study lends credence to the idea that to-do lists don’t work. The study suggests that, when it comes to taking action and creating results, humans have two-track minds.

The study, “Divided Representation of Concurrent Goals in the Human Frontal Lobes,” summarized in the Ars Technica story “In multitasking, more than two tasks do not compute,” used brain scans to observe brain activity while people did two or more things at once, and when they switched tasks or were interrupted. The resulting picture is of a brain that has two areas for guiding tasks. They can work together, for focus on a single task, but more often they split up, with one focusing on one task, the other one focusing on a second task.

Graptitude and the Clutter-to-Riches Story

I coined a new word, “graptitude,” in a dream a few moments ago. It’s the word “gratitude” with the “p” transposed from “grasp” or “grip,” and it refers to the practice of feeling grateful for the objects in your immediate physical surroundings — the things that are close enough that you can touch them or pick them up in your hands.

This is an idea you might have picked up from The Secret or from the mass of movies and writing that surrounded that work, with the talk about an “attitude of gratitude” and the vision boards made up of pictures that represented a person’s future material surroundings. In keeping with the mystical approach of The Secret, though, it made no attempt to name most of the things it talked about. Graptitude was just one of dozens of ideas that would fall under the rubric of Low of Attraction.

And graptitude is one of the simplest demonstrations of Law of Attraction. If you feel good about the physical objects that are around you already, it becomes easier for you to collect the material possessions you really want. This works, as countless rags-to-riches stories attest, even if the physical objects you see when you start out aren’t your own possessions. It works even if the things around you don’t have any worldly value. It works because feeling good about material things makes it easier to own material things, including the things you ideally would like to own.

Why It’s So Hard to Use Up What You Have

A month ago in the Happiness Project blog, Gretchen Rubin wrote about her challenges with her resolution to “Use up what you have”:

And sometimes I find myself saving things instead of using them, even when that makes no sense. I buy new white t-shirts, then “save” them. I don’t use the lovely stationery my sister gave me for Christmas, I’m “saving” it. But not using things is the same as wasting them. I want to put things to work and use them up.

The difficulty with this, of course, is a matter of scale. If you have an ordinary amount of possessions, it is already more than you can possibly use up.

Earth Hour

Earth Hour is happening right now — tonight at 8:30 local time. It’s a collective action that probably 5 to 10 percent of the world’s population is participating in — shutting off their lights for one hour. It’s a way to save money on electricity and a chance to look at the night sky (weather permitting, of course).

Turning off the lights would seem to interfere with your usual activities, but since it’s only for an hour, it won’t really. If you’re like most people, there are so many things you have in mind to do that it won’t be any trouble at all to come up with an hour’s worth of things to do that don’t require lights in the evening.

To participate in Earth Hour, just turn out the lights for an hour starting at 8:30 p.m. local time. To see what this looks like in cities around the world, take a look at the pictures at the Earth Hour web site http://www.earthhour.org.

“It’s Never About the Clutter”

A few days ago I had the chance to pick up and look at a book purporting to use ideas from personal organization to help people lose weight. This was a book that was released to great fanfare a few years ago, but it never caught on, and flipping through the pages, it was easy to see why.

Planning Is Guessing

The new book Rework might be about managing in big business, but what the authors have to say about planning applies just as well in any part of life. The authors don’t use the word suspense in the essay “Planning Is Guessing,” but they don’t have to:

Abundance Thinking vs. Fear of Nothing

Louise Hay’s new post “Clearing Your Clutter” is a nice summary of the major issues people face in addressing clutter: it’s easier to add than to take away; the energetic basis of clutter; the influence of thinking from the Great Depression (which affects all of us, whether we realize it or not).

Hay explains the issues surrounding clutter, but doesn’t offer an answer for it, beyond paying attention and remember to feel a sense of prosperity. It is a difficult answer because, if you’re like most people, spending time around clutter is enough to take away all your feelings of prosperity. How can you feel the wealth of the universe when you are stuck in the debris of your life?

This is why I suggest to people to address clutter only a few minutes at a time at first. You can get a few things taken care of before the focus on clutter drains away your feeling of abundance. But there is more to it than this.

The End of Closets Stuffed Full of Clothes

Last year’s biggest fashion trend, from my vantage point at least, was wearing the clothes of the year before. Most people, suffering from the financial pressure of a recession, didn’t buy any new clothes — but that doesn’t make it a fashion trend. What made it a fashion trend was that people who did buy new clothes mostly weren’t wearing them, preferring instead to follow the trend by wearing their slightly older clothes.

And this year? Simon Doonan, writing in the New York Observer, says this is “The End of Trends”: “Nobody is keeping score. All bets are off. Anything goes, even scrunch boots.”