The List

The thing about being in a place is that you get used it. That could be an apartment, a condo, a room. It doesn't matter. You can make a list of things you'd like to change, improve, or clean up, and you still have to actually do it eventually. That's the actual hard part.

Part of what happens, though, is becoming a victim of familiarity. You can get used to anything, it turns out, even things that bug you. Maybe something else bugs you more, or you realize dealing with it is more pain than it's worth. Maybe that's not actually true, but you convince yourself it's true for the moment and then move on.

Rob is currently dealing with a larger space than he's ever dealt with before, while Patrick is crumbling under the gravity of being in a house long enough (nearly 10 years!) that it can become hard to come up with a priority list on what to tackle. Annoyances stagnate.

Recently, though, Patrick ran into some magic.

Patrick: I think I talked about this during a HOA podcast once, but I recently stumbled into what’s become a super effective way for getting stuff done around the house. Well, I guess it’s more about prioritizing what needs to get done. Ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, when I’d have at least one day where the children were at daycare and I’d have the day to myself, I started a note on my phone called “House Things to Do.” The idea was to write down stuff around the house that I wanted to get done, chores that I had been putting off, and make a list. 

Some of what happens when I do have time, all the things I could do becomes overwhelming and, instead, very little gets done. There’s something to the idea of being able to check a task off a list, of being able to rank and organize various issues, that clicked this into place for me?

I try not to judge what goes on the list, which is how you end up with…

• Clean office carpet
• Organize office cables
• Recycle batteries 

…sitting alongside…

• Try to fix sliding glass door
• Book contractor for faucet installations
• Figure out water pressure in laundry room

Part of what happens, and I think this is pretty normal, is that many low-level annoying tasks in one’s life are easy to ignore. They “bother” you but do not bother you. It makes me twitch when I open up a drawer and see a mess of USB-whatever cables, but it doesn’t impact my day-to-day that I need to fish around in the drawer for a few minutes before I find what I’m looking for.

Putting on the list feels like filing an in-house report. It’s official! A declared problem! Top Men, also known as Patrick when he has the time to address it, are on it! We could use more Top Men, but we’re working with that we’ve got, and what we’ve got is an upcoming Monday off.

It also ends up serving as like, a reminder that the issue exists. I can forget about the junk drawer. I stop forgetting about the junk drawer if it’s in the note, you know? It’s there when I add a new thing to address, it’s there when I have free time and decide to check a few off the list.

Part of the routine becomes putting in the effort to put it on the list itself. I usually set something being added to the list at a threshold of “two.” If I notice something twice, it definitely has to go on the list. I try to make myself feel guilty if it’s not there. But the list itself does require effort.

Which is all to say that when that time off came up, it was awesome to look at the list, work out how much free time I actually had, and go from there. It was even better when I had two days without the kids during the Christmas holiday—nearly the entire list was checked off by the end. Turns out the water pressure was just twisting a valve underneath a slop sink that I’d missed?

Part of the reason I ended up with The List is because a house, no matter how big or small, is sprawling compared to an apartment. It’s possible to not run into an issue again for weeks or months. I like this process that I’ve stumbled into, and I’m hoping to lean into it for 2026. I realize you’re still in some form of a sprint/marathon/etc. With the house and the condo, but in a world where things slow down, do you think something like The List might work out for you?

Rob: There’s a file on my computer called “Rob’s Big To-Do” that I started sometime after we went under agreement for the new house and have been steadily adding to ever since. It is, to paraphrase Jacob Marley, a most ponderous chain, one that grows far faster than I can clear it.

Partly, that’s also because some of the things on that list are effectively shopping reminders. Fencing for the dogs, new bookcases… that stuff is waiting until we are less cash–poor and have had time to research exactly what we want to do. So there are things on that list that basically amount to, “In the next five years it would be cool to do this.” Not exactly conducive to feeding feelings of accomplishment.

The list is mostly useful as a reminder to myself that there are issues I need to address, but there’s also a switch in my head that flips whenever I decide something is a task that needs to be completed. Suddenly, I mostly feel guilt and dread over it, which makes me want to stay disengaged from the task. So paradoxically, the existence of the list also makes it harder to actually get important things done. Yet if there’s no list, I will forget about all kinds of important things I need to tackle.