Menus, Not Lists

 From Burkeman's Imperfectionist newsletter:

These menus also help clarify a critical way a menu differs from a to-do list: picking just one or two items from a menu is something you get to do, not something you have to do. The myriad things you could order – so far in excess of your capacity to consume them – don’t constitute a problem. It isn’t the case that in an ideal world, you’d eat them all, but because you’re a bit rubbish at eating, you must settle for just one or two, and feel like a failure. That would be ridiculous. The abundance is the point; and the joy is in getting to eat at the restaurant at all.

I take it you can see where this is going when it comes to to-do lists.

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Increasingly, I find myself treating my list of work projects as a menu, too. The contents of the menu is constrained by various goals and long-term deadlines, to be sure. But the daily practice is to pick something appetising from the menu, instead of grinding through a list. (It’s true that some menu items are dependent on my completing other items first, which is where the restaurant metaphor breaks down, but there’s usually a good number I can pick from.)

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One great benefit of doing this more consciously, though – of facing the fact that lists are menus – is that it shifts the source of gratification. The reward of pleasure, or a sense of meaning, no longer gets doled out stingily, in morsels, en route to some hypothetical moment of future fulfillment when the list is finally complete. Instead, it comes from getting to pick something from the menu – from getting to dive in to one of the vast range of possibilities the world has to offer, without any expectation of getting through them all. Which also means you get to have the reward right now.