I am not now nor will I ever be a sailor. And even though I heard once that 70% of us live within 30 miles of some coastline because “we are all drawn to the sea”, I live in the desert on purpose. I don’t know my aft from a hole in the ground and that’s just fine with me. However, when it comes to “listing”, I find myself quite the expert.

Some Captains of Industry and Navigators of our psyche will chart you a course to your dreams. Others will have you set sail on a vision quest. And, it seems, all hands on the good ship self help will insist you have some admirable goals. But for me, just listing things to do appears to tilt me in the right direction.

I have this very large master list of todos. Some are things I need to do, some are things I want to do, and some are things I just wish I could do. I update the list almost every day usually adding many more things that have occurred to me since last I looked at it. The time and resources necessary to accomplish everything on the list always far exceeds any hope of achieving these things in the short term. And I believe this is exactly why I do it.

Beacuse the magnitude of the list reminds me that I can’t possibly do it all, I carefully choose no more than five items to become immediate priorities. These are the things I will focus on until they are either completed or placed back onto the master list as, “just not ready to be done yet”.

There are times when it seems I am just treading water but when I look back at some specific point of origin I find that I am continually learning the ropes of this voyage.