Meta

I had to start a list to keep track of all the things I'm trying to keep track of.  It turns out that it's harder to stay on top of everything than I thought.  

Reading: when did I last pick up the magazine I'm currently reading?  I have a massive stack of unread magazines.  I'm going let many of the subscriptions lapse.  Once I'm caught up (ha) I'll think about resubscribing.

Reading: when did I last pick up the book I'm currently reading?  I have a massive list of books I want to read, so if I want to learn and grow, I need to regularly be making progress.

Email: when did I last get my personal email up-to-date?  It gets out of hand quickly.

Quicken: when did I last reconcile spending and check for new bills to pay?

Run: when did I last run?  Now, I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 220 miles left to run.  I'm ahead of schedule, but barely.  And it's been difficult to fit it in lately.

Calendar: when did I actually look at the calendar to make sure I'm keeping up on all of the larger things, like preparing for events and holidays and stuff?

Laundry: laundry is one of the things I do to help around the house.  If I don't keep up with it, it piles up quickly.

Cat: I feel guilty about how little time we spent with our pets in the past few years, especially now that most of the cats have passed away (or in the case of the dog, placed in a new home).  It became habit to keep the pets all confined to the downstairs so that the upstairs stayed cat-hair- and cat-mess-free.  But then if we were only downstairs to watch TV while we exercised, the pets got very little attention.  So this is to remind me to make sure that the cat gets some attention, whether it's spending time sitting on the couch while watching TV, or letting him up (since he's not messy) from time-to-time to be around us.

Prayer: when I hear of prayer requests, I place them on my prayer list.  There was a while there where I neglected it, only to revisit and find prayers requests for babies-on-the-way only to realize those were now babies who were here.  So this reminds me to regularly pray for a few requests and then move them to the bottom.

Bible Study: it's at our house, but then I kept not doing the reading and being disrupted by children during the video.  So this is supposed to help me to do more study during the week and watch the video ahead of time.

Google Reader: keeping up with all the stuff that I find interesting and want to keep current on.

Remember the Milk: this is what makes it meta.  When I use RTM, it keeps me current on all the stuff I need to do.  When things get busy, I ignore it for a day or two.  I found that if I can get it updated the night before, I'm much more likely to use it the next day to get the important stuff done.

So now as long as I look at this meta-list frequently, I can easily see the area most in need of attention.  We'll see how useful this is in the long-run.  (Though the really long-run actually needs to consider simplification.)