Needing to keep busy before we go away

I was talking to a friend the other day about how much I have to do at the moment. We are going away over Easter and I have a massive list to get through before we go away. But as I was going through it, I realised that actually, the majority aren't important at all. Most of them, no-one would even notice if I didn't do them. When I really thought about it, the only thing on the list that was absolutely vital was packing, everything else was just to make me feel better.

For example, I always like the house to be clean and tidy when we go away. It's even more important this time as we have family staying when we get back, so I need to make sure that the guest room is tidied, dusted, hoovered and has clean sheets and towels. It needs to be done of course, but really, a quick tidy, changing the sheets and running the hoover around doesn't take that long.

And although I like the house to be spotless when we are away, the minute we come home there are suitcases and their contents dumped everywhere and dirty washing all over the place, I don't have time to appreciate the hoovered floors and clear surfaces. I think that deep down what I'm really doing is imagining something happening to us while are away, and dealing with the anxiety about that by making sure people don't think that we live in a pig sty!

Another thing that I fret about before we go away is making sure that my blog and social media are scheduled with some content to post while I'm away. This means coming up with the ideas well in advance and finding the time to get them written up so that a new post will appear every few days. But does it really matter if I'm not pushing out content constantly? Lots of blogs I read only publish once a week, many even less often, and it means that I look forward to and appreciate their content rather than just having my Feedly filled up with a stream of generic blog posts that I just scan through. Again, I think it's just my anxiety coming out, that if I take a break people will forget who I am and no-one will ever read my blog again.

The truth is that I really like having a long to do list. I've written before about how I use Trello to organise my life, and I have groups of tasks which need to be done daily, weekly, and as one offs. It gives me a lot of satisfaction to drag a task to the next day or delete it completely, and it makes me feel that I've had a productive day if I've ticked plenty of things off the list. It's also a way of measuring my worth as a stay at home Mum with children that are out of the house for most of the day, knowing that on the surface at least I've achieved something worthwhile.

Do you have a big to do list? How many things are actually vital to have completed?

Photo - Glenn Carstens-Peters via Unsplash