Too Much To Do

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1190 Virginia Ridge Rd.
Philo Ohio 43771 USA
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Are you busy? Not just comfortably busy, but seven-calls-on-hold-late-for-an-appointment- haven't-gotten-to-last-Monday's-mail-two-proposals-and-20-letters-behind busy?

It seems everyone I speak with lately is either unemployed or overwhelmed. Of course the unemployed (generally referred to as consultants) are also busy trying not to be unemployed. So I think that just leaves one guy in Texarkana who seems to have a bit of time on his hands. The rest of us are swamped.

We have all heard the predictions or read the articles about how technology would make this decade the age of leisure, only to be followed by articles reporting on how those previous articles were just so much horse hockey and that we really live in a dog-eat-dog era of corporate downsizing, 60-hour work weeks and multi-tasking lifestyles.

If our to-do list is not enough to give each of us a coronary, the world seems bent on throwing curve balls at us on a regular basis. Let me give you an example of how nuts this can get at times.

Last Friday, having just returned from a trip and preparing for another, I grabbed a couple of the requisite white shirts, intending to drop them at the laundry on my way to work (isn't 24-hour service great? However did we survive before we could buy a bagel at 3:30 in the morning?).

Well, one thing led to another and I just ran out of time, so I skipped the laundry... it could wait until lunch. So when lunch time came (with another meeting), I asked the people I was with if we could swing by the dry cleaner's on the way to the restaurant. As they waited in the parking lot, I ran the shirts in, only to be told they were going out of business (the nerve of some people, making major life decisions just to inconvenience me!).

With no time to find another cleaner, I decided to stop by the mall on my way home and actually buy (I guess six years is long enough for a shirt) two replacement shirts. Now, I would rather spend the day at the dentist than go to the mall, so I decided to slip in the back door to Dillards, thus avoiding the traffic and the people and the throngs of pre-adolescent girls with big hair.

I turned the corner and found myself in the middle of a circus... 20 or so police cars (lights flashing), TV Channels 13, 10, and 8 setting up broadcast vans (with their throngs of barely post-adolescent women, still with their big hair, looking earnest and telling us that they don't have a clue what's going on inside but they will be there live on the scene until someone tells them what to say), and helicopters circling overhead. I later found out that a man with a gun was in Dillard's ... holding himself hostage. I know the feeling. Thirty minutes later and he might have been me.

In fact, we all know the feeling... we each live it every day (except that guy in Texarkana). The world is just one big crazy dysfunctional family and the only thing that seems to keep us even partially sane is that we haven't got time to think about it.

I guess the big question is, "What can or should we do about it?"

Exercise, personal organizers, computer assistant programs, meditation, heavy and sustained drinking... every suggestion I have heard always entails putting more items on my to-do list. There may simply be no answer to this dilemma. I suspect the sad reality is that task overload is simply the burden we must carry to survive and thrive in the 21st century. But like a golfer with a credit card, we will not let the futility of the effort keep us from buying countless gizmos that don't have a prayer of working.

Which reminds me. On my desk is a Zen daily tear-off calendar, a gift for Christmas designed to help keep my life in perspective. According to that calendar it is still January 3rd. In fact, it's been January 3rd for nearly three months. I promise I'm going to read those sage bits of wisdom one of these days...if I get the time. Let me just make a note of that so I won't forget. . . .

written by Jay Warmke - March, 1997

Too Much to Do