To-do Lists: A Smaller Facet of A Larger Problem
By Srishti Bali
To-do lists. A cultural phenomenon that extends to all facets of life. A solution that optimises your productivity and makes you feel and appear hyper organised!
Have projects, tasks, and various meetings to prepare for at work? Make a to-do list.
Going for a holiday and want to optimise your time and get your money’s worth? Make a to-do list.
Packing in as many books to read during your time off to appear refreshed but learned to your colleagues? Make a to-do list.
A solution offered by managers, friends, and family to fix all your problems with organisation and productivity guilt. Almost like a successful marketing ploy with free subscribers and free referrals – dominating society.
However, what has made us so captivated by to-do lists?
Contemporary society has moved beyond the traditional methods employed within the ‘capitalist factory’ in creating productive ‘docile bodies’ per Foucault’s ‘Discipline and Punish’. However, this transition has not been an abandonment, but a transformation of the method in creating ‘docile bodies’, where individuals are conditioned to be proactive – both as workers and consumers. The sophistication of the modern economic, political, social and cultural system is fueled by the self-policing that individuals perpetually engage in with respect to their own productivity. To-do lists are just one example of a cultural phenomenon that has adopted into a form of self-policing surrounding our productivity. Naturally, it may seem disproportionate to diminish the use of to-do lists. However, this article is not undermining the validity of to-do lists as a method to mitigate forgetting important commitments but is highlighting to-do lists as a cultural phenomenon that has been repetitively interlaced with productivity rhetoric.
Although we may be divorced from such social analysis, how many times have we been susceptible to look for ways in which our productivity can be further optimised? How many times have we been looking for gaps in our approaches to managing everything? Often, a solution that springs to mind is to rectify these feelings through a to-do list. This is because a to-do list has been sold as this viable solution to be able to track our gaps and then to be able to keep record of when we are able or not able to achieve the things, we set out to do. It is a perpetual reminder of our worth. Often, used in our work, in managing our personal commitments and life administration. Though it is a style of organisation, it is a method of concealing productivity guilt and shifting the onus completely to ourselves.
To-do lists are a way in which we are told that we can mitigate our anxiety associated with our productivity. A way in which we can control whether we are ‘incapable’ – but ‘incapable’ of what? Not being an optimal body within a framework of capitalism? One designed for a robotic style of operation where the recognition of our individuality is circumvented but our individual responsibility is disproportionality high?
Even when we believe that to-do lists are the answer that makes us satisfied when we are able to see what we are ‘achieving’, what about the feeling of being overwhelmed that never subsides when we cannot tick every item of our to-do list? Leading to a detrimental impact on morale where self statements of ‘why am I not working hard enough?’ flutter in our minds.
This new mode of operation further accelerates the docility that was to be achieved through traditional methods within an era of industrialisation where there is a clear shift of the onus to the individual to be the most proactively productive as they can be.
Instinctively, it may seem like a drastic comparison to an era that is distinctly outdated. However, there is a direct correlation between productivity rhetoric and ‘thought policing’ – a concept explored by George Orwell in his novel 1984. The concept of ‘thought policing’ is a process of trying to question, control, regulate and eventually manipulate another person’s thoughts and feelings. In this way, even if we are aware and choose to not have a system to self-police our productivity, we are susceptible to critique from others. This is because a culture of productivity guilt is a contemporary manifestation of the ‘thought policing’ Orwell introduces. Namely, because we are able to identify when we fall short and if we do not, others will do so for us.
Essentially, we have entered into a cycle of being unendingly gaslit. Leading to rather sinister ramifications for ourselves.
The problem isn’t all about to-do lists. It is about what they epitomise and how they conceal an issue that is rather perverse. It is rather simplistic for an article to suggest that we mustn’t operate through productivity guilt given it is consequential to the structures of our capitalistic society. If an article was to suggest that it would just be perpetuating the same rhetoric that we must shift the onus to ourselves. We mustn’t. What I hope is that as a community we start to ignite a shift from chasing a ‘dream’ interlaced with workforce and academic validation that we have to prove ourselves to be worthy of. Because we are all worthy of a quality of life that is not centred around work, and in extension, capitalism.
