Hi all,
Thanks for the welcome, @Shaz51 and thanks @greenspace for saying I'm not verbose. I try to reference things I'm responding to and be thorough, so the person I'm talking to feels properly acknowledged. That can wind up a bit wordy and oftentimes people don't care for it.
@tyme - if you don't mind, I'm going to chime in on the question of whether lists are helpful or stressful. In my case, the answer is both! I long since found that if I don't write things down, I am guaranteed to forget them. On the down side, I often don't remember I've written it down, so I have umpteen lists - on whiteboards, in writing pads, on my phone, occasionally on my computer - and the same items keep cropping up across various lists. For the moment jotting down a few important things for this one day and sticking it on the kitchen bench is working. The novelty is fading out though, and it won't work much longer - techniques that work for a time inevitably just turn into the visual equivalent of white noise, the eye just starts to skip over it as a background thing. Problematic! I have the same problem with things like phone reminders. They worked for a while. But there are so many things to remember - take your asthma meds, take out the bins, you have an appointment, phone bill's due, blah blah blah. There are then bleeps and bloops for everything and bam - it's white noise, disappeared into the background. The other problem with phone reminders and lists - if I go to check them, and I have a message or a missed call, that thing catches my attention and the point of the reminder is off and away, out of my head until "uh-oh, that's the rubbish truck, and I forgot the bins". For this reason I have notifications turned off for social media of all kinds, we don't need more bleeps and bloops!
I guess that ramble didn't help much! Sometimes lists are great. They were a lifesaver when I started work in my current role, though it's worth noting that was coupled with the adrenaline of deadlines, which helps keep me focused. At home it's another matter entirely. Some of my phone lists have retained usefulness, I seem to be able to keep track of appointments by keeping them in one list, which I refer to periodically when I have a feeling I'm forgetting something. I write a daily planner on lined A4 pages I mostly forget to look at now I've been doing it a while, but I've found the tactical experience of handwriting a thing helps me remember the things I wrote a little better, or at least enough to leave a niggling sense I should check the list sometimes. It's all so hit and miss.
AFK.
