[A] comet or a meteor is on its way to destroy Earth. People all over New York are running cover, and two strangers who have just decided to ride it out meet each other on the street. One asks the other something like, “do you want to love me for the rest of the world?” And then they go up to the dude’s apartment and do relationshippy things like eat cereal and do crosswords and bone until the comet comes and the world ends.
If my short ever came out on DVD, this would be on the back cover.
I had a todo list breakthrough last month. You actually have to do the things on your todo list. I’ll give you a moment to let that sink in. You actually have to set aside a time, read the list and then, one by one, actually do the things you decided you needed to do when you made the list.
It just never occurred to me before. I read and loved David Allen’s Getting Things Done and became quite adept at making lists. Each item in it’s own category, written as a succinct “next action”. Projects broken down into a digestible cascade of events. I wasn’t afraid to remove things I would never actually do. But I was afraid to do the things I actually needed to do.
So a funny thing happened. I was staring at my todo list one day, getting very anxious over all the stuff on my to do list. Instead of closing the list like I usually do, I instead thought, “OK Shawn, let’s do one of these things right now.”
Then I did it. And it was done. “Wow, that worked eerily well,” I thought. “Let’s try it again.” I did this for an hour until half of my todo list was complete. Shocked and frazzled like the first time Peter Parker learns he can shoot webs out of his wrists, I sat down and took a deep breath. “If I just keep writing things down… then doing them… I will be unstoppable.”
Why did this take me so long? Why did something so obvious elude me for all these years? The lists never went away when I ignored them. The answer was right under my nose the whole time. The lists will go away when I make them go away.
I don’t trust anybody who was born after April 30th, 1945. That includes almost everyone I meet, except the old people I hang out with on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Sundays. I like to spend time with them, because they are the only people who you can be sure weren’t Hitler in a past life.