Oliver Burkeman poses an uncomfortable question in Meditations for Mortals: what if you never get on top of your to-do list? What’s more, what if you never become the good listener or the dedicated runner or achieve a Zero Inbox like a worthy person would? But Burkeman, writer of the biweekly newsletter “The Imperfectionist” and author of a slew of books on how to navigate life as a mere mortal, turns the sobering prospect of our own never-doneness and fall-shortedness into an opportunity to breathe a sigh of relief and stop expecting anything else.

In Meditations for Mortals published this year, Burkeman provides suggestions for how to feel better about it all by turning the tables on our usual approaches to life optimization. Here are two of my favorites which take on the problem of never being done:

1. The Done List
   Instead of toiling away at our usual To-Do list with boxes that never all get checked off by days’ end, simply shift over to a Done list. The fundamental problem with the To-Do list is it ensures we start off every day underwater and behind but even if by some miracle we do manage to get all the to do’s checked off the list, we’ve only brought ourselves up to a neutral position just in time for the next dump of to-do’s. The Done list corrects this terrible position of debt by ensuring that every day will put us in the positive by noting everything we’ve accomplished instead even if that is just getting out of bed.
   
2. The Menu
   While a Done List might be all well and good, how are we to keep track of all the things that need our attention if we don’t have a To-Do list? Simple. We just call it a Menu instead. A menu never assumes we’re going to get to everything on it. It assumes we’ll order a reasonable number of items based on hunger and taste, cost vs. available resources and so on and so forth. We won’t feel bad at all that we’re only choosing a few because what sense is there in bankrupting our resources or making ourselves sick?

While I love the table-turning twist of the Done list and the Menu, I have one quibble with Done. It has a whiff of the swift about it, as if we’re more focused on the completion of the thing than we are the meaning of it. For that reason, I favor re-casting the Done List as the Accomplishment List. There is a sense of pride and good self-esteem that goes along with accomplishments. It’s why making a daily list of accomplishments is such a good tool for people trying to walk themselves out of depression or low spirits. Even the smallest of things can be considered an accomplishment – getting up, for instance. There’s just no way that seeing a list of your accomplishments growing over the course of the day isn’t reinforcing and life affirming. And that is the opposite of frantically checking off boxes to keep them from burying you.

It never stops surprising me how a slight adjustment in language can create a whole new reality. 

To a day of accomplishments!

E