How Not to Write a ‘Things To Do’ List

I’ve been making a Google ipage. In the spirit of Just Fucking Sort It September. The two events may seem unrelated. It may appear that an ordinary Google homepage is already quite tidy, sorted and generally acceptable. The excitement of occasionally having the bods at Google add a few little festive seasonal thingys might seem sufficient. But this wasn’t the point. The point was my ‘Things To Do’ list.

I have always had an endearing fondness for a ‘Things To Do’ list. This is mostly because I always seem to have a lot of Things To Do but my memory seems incapable of remembering more than three things at a time. Thus, if my ‘Things To Do’ list comprises of:
Wash Kitchen Floor
Write Novel
Start Strange and Obscure New Business Involving Thailand Bhats
and
Pick Lawyer Up From School
things can go seriously awry. In my eargerness to do the things to do on the list I may spend over a year writing a novel and starting a strange and obscure new business involving Thailand bhats and the poor Lawyer waits at the school gates and essentially starves to death.

So, to my great joy I discovered that one can put a ‘Things To Do’ list on a Google ipage. So every time I go on the internet my list appears, there, before my eyes, in front of my face and generally writ large in a comfortingly inescapable manner. Starvation of my loved ones no longer is an issue.

So, I have been making a Google ipage. This is what happened:

I put up a ‘Things To Do’ list. Good. Then I’m offered more. More sounds good. Perhaps with even more than a ‘Things To Do’ list my life will be even more fucking sorted. Hooray. There isn’t just more, there is lots more. How exciting. So I choose –

A fortune cookie – handy for predicting the future and doubles as a starvation prevention.

A clock – useful in case the billion other clocks I’m surrounded by suddenly implode.

A sticky note – in case my ‘Things To Do’ list is not sufficiently yellow or sticky.

A currency converter – you never know when you might need the price of a loaf a bread in Thailand Bhats.

Freebie o’the day – an obvious essential for the impoverished single mother, today I can get free shampoo, a poster of Eminem and 15,000 kitchen-tested recipes. How fine is that?

A water tracker – which I’d hoped was going to tell me about the leaks in the shed roof, or maybe why the upstairs tank was so determined to store its water downstairs. Disappointingly it was to keep track of how many glasses of water I’d drunk today. I already have a gadget for that called a bladder.

A Shakespearian insulter – today’s insult is ‘Thou bootless dizzy-eyed malcontent!’ Have already used that a number of times, mostly to address the leaking shed.

A Google technology newsfeed – mostly because I felt sorry for it because it had less than 1000 useres.

Chat in Chinese – well it could be useful.

A spider – just to keep all the ones in the house company.

A new body – don’t need to tell you what that’s for.

A hunky man – ok, desperation has hit in a serious way.

So, my ipage was looking pretty damn exhilarating. What with insulting translations in Chinese, hunky men playing in Shakespearian with my new body, and sticky notes telling my fortune in Thailand Bhats I discovered that my ‘Things To Do’ list was really quite unimportant. I deleted it with a jolly cry of ‘Hence rotten thing! Or I shall shake thy bones out of thy garments.’