The To-Do List

by Mike Gayle

  ‘So what exactly are you saying?’ said Arthur. ‘That you’ve written a To-Do list?’

  ‘It is a To-Do List of sorts, but actually it’s much more than that.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘In every way.’

  ‘Yeah, but in what way exactly?’

  ‘Well, in the way that it’s probably more like a manifesto.’

  ‘A manifesto for what?’

  ‘A manifesto for life . . . a manifesto for anyone who has ever sat down and thought to themselves “If only I had more time I’d do this or that” . . . in fact it’s a manifesto for people like us.’

  ‘He means a manifesto for grumpy thirtysomethings in ill-fitting clothes who hate their jobs,’ said Danby dryly.

  ‘And this manifesto,’ asked Henshaw, ‘has got how many things on it?’

  I coughed nervously, aware of the mockery I was about to receive.

  ‘At the last count, it was 1,277.’

  The whole table exploded with laughter so violent it threatened to upturn several pints.

  ‘You’ve honestly got a one-thousand-two-hundred-and-seventy-seven-item-long To-Do List?’ said Kaytee. ‘Mine usually max out around thirty.’

  ‘This is brilliant!’ laughed Arthur. ‘That will take you forever!’

  ‘I was thinking I’d give myself until my next birthday.’

  ‘Actually.’ Henshaw pulled a contemplative face. ‘To give Mike his due that works out roughly to about three and a bit things a day, which I reckon is pretty doable.’

  ‘If they’re easy-to-do things,’ countered Arthur. ‘Is everything on the list easy to do?’

  I shook my head. ‘There’s loads of stuff that will take weeks if not months. Stuff like losing weight, getting hold of lost friends and learning basic Italian.’

  ‘Is parachuting on your list?’ asked Amanda, reaching into her bag for a pen. ‘If it’s not I’ll put it on for you.’

  ‘No,’ I replied sternly.

  ‘Why not?’ Amanda looked hurt.

  ‘Because it’s not about jumping out of planes or any of that business, it’s about more everyday things. The kind of stuff that you ought to do but can always find a good excuse for not doing.’

  ‘Like cleaning out the guttering?’

  ‘Exactly.’ I scanned my list. ‘Item number 970: “Clear leaves from gutter”.’

  ‘Or sorting out damp patches in your hallway,’ suggested Danby.

  ‘Right on the nose. Item 125: “Sort damp patch in bathroom”.’

  ‘Right,’ said Amanda, ‘I get you now. I’ve got a To-Do List of my own like that as long as my arm.’

  ‘But I bet it’s not 1,277 items long,’ said Danby adopting his usual stance as the Sunday Night Pub Club’s resident cynic. ‘Who really has that many things on their To-Do List? This just sounds made up.’ He held out his hand. ‘Come on, show me the list! Let’s see what kind of stuff is on there that you think you need to do.’

  ‘Hands off! Lanky one! Until it’s over no one gets to see the full list but me.’

  ‘So no one’s seen the list? Not even Claire?’

  ‘She’s seen bits of it – before I really knew what I was doing – but not the full thing . . .’ I paused for a moment. ‘Oh, and Claire’s friend Alexa has seen bits of it too.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Gary (who is often quite quiet on a Sunday night given that his Saturday nights tend to go on until ten or eleven on a Sunday morning). ‘You’ve got your list and now it’s got integrity, so what’s next?’

  I surprised myself by the determination in my voice. ‘Well it’s this: I’m actually going to do it.’

  Chapter 4: ‘Regardless of how ill prepared you are, head off like a bull in a china shop.’

  Every now and again, when friends drop by for a cup of tea, Claire likes to share with them a pair of amusing stories that don’t exactly show me in the best possible light. The first, referred to as ‘the bull incident’ involves a charging bull and an allegation (which I strongly deny) that several years ago when the aforementioned bull charged us as we crossed a field, I abandoned my wife-to-be at the first sign of danger and leapt over a fence to save myself. The second story (which I admit is true) concerns a spectacularly awful attempt at DIY.

  Waking up on a Good Friday morning in a pre-kid world filled with the cheer of the forthcoming long weekend, I decided that I would take action on the myriad DIY tasks that needed doing around the house. And while there were window latches to fix, pictures to put up, leaking taps to attend to and a loo flush that sounded like a foghorn to sort out, I decided that the most pressing job lay somewhere else entirely. Today, I was going to paint the ugly brown floor tiles in the conservatory.

  Most normal people would have done some minor investigation into the world of tile painting but I wasn’t exactly normal people. Before Claire was even out of bed I’d got up, showered, breakfasted, made my way to B&Q and returned home with eight litres of brilliant white paint. Now, you’d be forgiven for thinking that even with a cursory knowledge of the nature of tiles, I’d have bought a special tile paint or at a push a floor paint specifically designed to adhere to non-porous floor tiles. Sadly, I did neither of those things. Reasoning that all paint was pretty much the same, I purchased a brilliant white paint with an eggshell finish designed to be applied to internal walls and ceilings. Nowhere on the tins did it say that it was okay to use it on floors and when Claire pointed this out, having entered the kitchen in her dressing gown to find me on my hands and knees daubing huge dollops of paint all over the conservatory floor, my reply was a casual comment along the lines of, ‘You worry too much, it’s paint. How wrong can paint be?’

  Two days later, having persuaded Claire to finish off the job that I was no longer interested in, we found out.

  As we placed the conservatory furniture on the pristine white floor for the first time, we were horrified to notice huge swathes of white paint lifting up the second they came into contact with anything abrasive. Within a matter of hours the conservatory floor went from looking like an expanse of newly fallen snow to the slushy mess left behind on a busy urban street a day or two later.

  I share this story in order to illustrate an important fact about myself: when it comes to an undertaking, I am the very definition of: ‘Act first. Think later’. And the To-Do List was no exception.

  The morning following my announcement to the Sunday Night Pub Club I’d felt on top of the world. Fired up by the commitment that I had made in front of my friends and with my mind racing with anticipation at getting stuck in, I shared my good news with Claire over breakfast.

  ‘So you’re actually going to do this list thing?’

  ‘Absolutely. I really think tackling the List is going to be the making of me.’

  ‘I’m sure it will be,’ said Claire dryly. ‘So what’s the plan? If you are going to start as of today may I suggest, “Help Claire out with the ironing because the To-Do ironing basket upstairs is bursting at the seams”.’

  ‘I’d love to, babe,’ I replied, ‘but I’m afraid ironing is not on the List.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be, would it? So what exactly is your plan of attack? Have you got any strategy?’

  ‘Other than looking at the List and doing stuff on it?’

  ‘Trust me, Mike, I know you better than you know yourself and I’m telling you that you’ll need a plan of attack if you’re not going to get bored with the whole thing after ten minutes. Just remember the tile-painting episode.’

  ‘That was different,’ I protested, but had to stifle a smile.

  ‘Different how? Different because you tackled a job in a half-cocked manner without having a plan? Or different because it wasn’t you that got bored halfway through and talked me into finishing it off while you watched TV?’

  This woman was definitely raining on my parade.

  ‘Just different. The To-Do List is a different kettle of fish altogether, okay? It’s not a brown-tiled floor, it’s a To-Do List.’


  ‘It doesn’t matter, you still need a plan,’ said Claire giving me her best “this will all end in tears” shake of the head. ‘You can’t just race headlong into the List hoping that a bit of luck and sheer momentum will take you all the way through to your next birthday.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ I replied in a high-handed manner. ‘Well, we’ll have to see about that.’

  I made my way upstairs to my office in the loft, sat down at my desk and began looking around for inspiration. Before it struck, I accidentally knocked my computer mouse and within a few moments I was notified by electronic ‘ding’ that I had seven emails waiting.

  There wasn’t anything exciting: some spam; a number of invitations to buy stuff from John Lewis and Amazon; and a mocking message from Arthur offering a hard cash bet that I would fall on my face with this To-Do-List thing before the month was out.

  Fighting talk! I dashed off a dismissive reply to Arthur and then the following email to friends, family and work colleagues, in fact everybody in my online address book:

  Dear all,

  Just wanted to let you know that having come to the conclusion that it’s about time I joined the world of fully functioning adults on a permanent basis, as of today I will be undertaking a 1,277-item To-Do List (while continuing with my regular ‘day job’) which I plan to have completed by my 37th birthday in approximately twelve months’ time. The reason I’m telling you lot this is to give me the inspiration and motivation to succeed, knowing full well that should I fail my task I will look like a complete and utter buffoon in front of you all and will afford you the right to mock me (as some have done already) to within an inch of my life.

  See you all soon

  Mike x

  I read and re-read the message several times before pressing send and then watched keenly as my computer’s email programme flung the hundred or so messages it had loaded up out into cyberspace. There was no going back. Right there on the spot I was officially motivated. Feeling as though I was still riding the crest of a wave I replied to all the emails in my in-box and then permanently deleted all 122 items of spam from the rubbish bin. It was almost as if things that needed to be done seemed to be lining themselves up just to have me knock them straight back down and, although none of them was on my official To-Do List, getting them done was a good feeling nonetheless.

  Keen for this euphoria to continue, I took a look through the List for any items particularly suited to being ticked off from where I was sitting and eventually found Item 109: ‘Be a better correspondent with people that you don’t get to see every day because even a single email once a month is better than nothing.’ I decided to email my friend Lisa.

  Since Lisa had emigrated to Australia six years earlier we’d been terrible at keeping in touch. Every time I’d come across her name in my address book I’d feel a pang of guilt and think to myself, ‘I really must drop her a line and see how she’s doing’ only to get distracted moments later by something seemingly more pressing. Well, not any more. I put some music on quietly and wrote Lisa a long letter asking about her news, telling her all mine and even adding in a selection of pictures of Lydia.

  I now felt positively glowing. No one writes long emails any more and yet I had just written and sent what was almost a novella to Lisa. And even though this solitary email might not constitute a tick (there were friends in New Zealand, South Africa, south Wales and Manchester who needed emails plus the tenor of the entry was that I had to correspond on a regular basis) I was entitled to feel that I wasn’t just a good person. I was well on my way to becoming a great person.

  I briefly contemplated a celebratory lap of the house but just as I was about to stand up the following email popped up on screen:

  All right, Mate?

  Just read your email! 1,277-item To-Do List! You have got to be joking! I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you, fella! Good luck.

  John-boy

  Which was quickly followed by this one from Nadine:

  Mikey babe!

  Are you mad? A 1,277-item To-Do List! I hope Item 344 is: ‘Nip down to London and have lunch with Nadine as I haven’t seen her in ages?’ It better had be!

  Best of luck!

  Nx

  Which was followed by this one from Chris:

  1,277 things! You’ve got no chance! Let’s meet up for a beer sometime to discuss!

  See you soon.

  Chris

  Message after message pinged into my in-box. It was great. Everyone knew what I was doing. There really was no backing out, even if I’d wanted to, which of course I didn’t. So in the spirit of doing things now rather than later I decided to tackle Item 173: ‘Sort out garden because it’s a jungle out there’.

  Having donned my green parka, army surplus hat and old trainers, I opened the back door and peered outside at the patio. It was covered in a thick carpet of leaves from the huge oak tree at the side of the house. Despite my strenuously wishing that they would magically disappear they had remained in situ, mocking my lack of gardening skills for some time now.

  I ventured down to the bottom of the garden and opened my shed (like me, it had seen better days) and rummaged around for the rake (a wedding present from my parents).

  Looking at the sheer volume of leaves (you couldn’t see any of the blue brick patio at all) and factoring in the leaf fall on the garden itself (three times the size of the patio) I concluded I had the wrong tool for the job. Okay, it was a rake of sorts but it clearly wasn’t designed for heavy-duty leaf clearance. On a recent drive to town I had passed a couple of council workmen and briefly admired their huge leaf-retrieval system that looked like a pair of broom handles with scoops at the end. That was exactly what I needed and as the wind began to blow, swirling the leaves at my feet and making my eyes water, I decided that a trip to B&Q was in order.

  Even though my local B&Q was relatively quiet it still took me the best part of three quarters of an hour to make it out of the store. This had less to do with leaf-picking-up devices (I managed to pick up one called ‘Big Green Hands’, that looked like a huge pair of plastic claws) and had more to do with the fact that I got distracted.

  There’s something incredibly comforting about DIY stores. I like the way they’re set out in aisles that you can wander up and down, I like the way that you can rarely tell what the weather’s doing once you’re inside but most of all I like the fact that they are filled with a hundred and one solutions to everyday problems and though I had 1,277 pressing problems, I couldn’t resist a few solutions to problems that I didn’t have yet which explains why, along with my ‘Big Green hands’, I left the store with two tubes of No More Nails, a scart plug, two bedside lamps, a device for detecting electrical cables behind walls, two packs of discounted Christmas baubles and a new set of Christmas lights, a cork notice board and a mini potted palm. I didn’t actually do any gardening that day because by the time I reached home it had started to rain.

  This haphazard, start-a-million-different-projects-but-finish-none-of-them attitude continued not just through the first day of the To-Do List, but through the first week and well into the second. But it wasn’t until the beginning of the third week as Claire and I sat down after putting Lydia to bed, that I finally admitted that perhaps Claire had made a good point about the necessity of a plan.

  ‘So how are you getting on with that List of yours?’ This was the first reference that she had made to the List since she’d reminded me of the Tile-Painting Incident.

  ‘Not great,’ I confessed. ‘Today I thought about learning Italian, I got a few tools out of the shed, I bought a load more stuff from B&Q that I neither needed nor wanted, I half wrote a letter to my Uncle Churchill in Jamaica whom I haven’t seen in thirty-odd years and I’m getting a bit sick of the fact that the loft still looks like a tip since my attempt to clear out the under-eaves space. It’s been a great couple of weeks for procrastination but not a brilliant one for getting things done. Okay, I admit it. You were right, I was wro
ng. There is no way that I’ll be able to keep this up if I don’t come up with a plan to fool myself into staying on course, so I’ve made a couple of decisions.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, the first is that I’m not going to do anything more today, tomorrow, or for the rest of the week.’

  ‘So, some kind of less-is-more philosophy?’ joked Claire. ‘Let me know if it works!’

  ‘No.’ I narrowed my eyes in mock menace. ‘I do need a plan and I think I’ve finally got one.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘To take it one step at a time.’

  ‘And your first step is . . .?’

  ‘Get some expert advice.’

  ‘From whom?’

  ‘Well, that’s the genius part,’ I said, tapping the side of my nose in a knowing fashion. ‘I’m planning to get my expert advice from the best in the business.’

  ‘What business would that be?’

  ‘The time business,’ I replied. ‘I’m going to get me some face time with a genuine Time Management guru.’

  Chapter 5: ‘Get some advice from people who know what they’re talking about.’

  A couple of years ago, around the time I was turning thirty, I had a few moments similar to my current To-Do-List obsession when I thought I should sort my life out. I can see now it was the whole turning thirty ‘Where am I going? Where have I been? Where am I right now?’ thing but at the time it seemed like the moment to get myself organised.

  My first step was to head for the shops in the hope that purchasing useful things would miraculously change my life. This was a daft theory and one all too well understood by those who churn out work-out DVDs in January. Just as my wife purchasing Davina McCall’s Power of Three work-out DVD and leaving it gathering dust on the shelf didn’t help anyone but Davina McCall, buying Mark Forster’s book Get Everything Done and Still Have Time To Play, reading the first two chapters and then not going back to it because (irony of ironies) I couldn’t find the time, doesn’t help anyone but Mark Forster.