This morning I took a little time to get my to-do list for the fall semester in order. It sounds like a small thing, and it certainly is, but it’s a great help in terms of simplifying and clarifying the things I’ve got to do and the things I’d like to accomplish.

The first section involves the simplest of tasks, the ones I can tackle in a matter of minutes. I like to think the cap on the time frame is about three hours. Some items are ridiculously brief but needful. Topping the list today is “Remind my partner to cancel her doctor’s appointment”; I’ve got to buy new socks and new shoes as well; and at the bottom of the uppermost list is “Prepare the discussion board area for the first essay workshop in ENG 101.” I’ll surely tackle every item today and add a few to tomorrow’s docket while I’m at it.

The second section involves the middle term, bits of business that will probably last several hours or take a couple of days. I plan to back up my computer files this week, for example, and flesh out my promotion file for 2026, which will involve looking back through old emails to chronicle my work as an academic advisor as well as my committee service. Nothing in this section is pressing, but it does help me to break down some of the chewier tasks I might otherwise avoid. The trickiest bit will be “Finalize combat mechanics for the tabletop RPG,” which might well belong to the third section but seems like a smaller, more manageable bit than “Finish drafting the whole flippin’ RPG.”

And the third section involves those items that have no certain end date in sight–lots of “Draft this story” and “Draft that screenplay” and “Write up that syllabus for the course you’d like to pitch.” Nothing in this section has an imminent deadline. Some of it is purely best-case scenario stuff, tackling whatever I’ve got the time to attend to. Putting it out there in the future gives me a little imaginative room to move and keeps my noggin from getting overcrowded. Overcrowding is a problem I’m prone to, but dividing things up by their likely time frames keeps my brain from feeling overclocked (trying to process too much stuff at the same time). When I’m feeling overclocked I tend to drift toward time-wasting activities that give me little hits of task-completion dopamine.

Acknowledging that last habit has been pretty helpful in terms of fiddling with my neurochemistry. I’ve been absorbed lately by some studies I’ve stumbled across on how good stories flood the skull with dopamine, cortisol, and oxytocin, rewarding the body for focusing attention, cooperating with the writer or teller, and getting to the narrative payoff. My subdivisions don’t yield quite the same payoff, of course, but they do help me get where I’m going and give me smallish rewards along the way. Like most existential revisions, there’s nothing groundbreaking about the change, but as I sit here happily tapping at the keys I get a little bit of anticipatory pleasure, both from getting a thing done (“Post to Worpress” is on the first list today) and from the clarity I know will come when the thing is in the rearview mirror and I can hit the strikethrough button to get it off the list. It deals with over-clocking and -crowding in one swell foop, and that, for me, is crucial for keeping the wheels a-turning.