lists

Despite the fact that it's my summer holidays I seem to be getting very stressed. I think it's mostly because I'm worried about wasting my time and being bored so I schedule a lot of things and don't give myself a chance to relax and enjoy my free time.

Generally, I'm a pretty unorganised person. I'm constantly rushing from place to place almost being late, or, well, mostly being late. I usually attempt to plan, decide that it's too hard and give up. Then I leave things to the last minute and end up rushing to get places on time. It's quite a good system really.

This scattered lifestyle, shall we say, could be caused because of my laziness actually. For example, take my room. Cleaning and tidying are so much effort and time-consuming that I just give up and live in a mess. I think that affects me on a subconscious level and makes me feel like my life is a big mess instead of organised and neat and tidy. Like, when I do exam revision or work, I have to clear my desk and the surrounding space, then I feel better and can work well.

Now for the good bit, the link to the title. I always plan to do things or realise that I have accumulated a lot of things to do so I like to write lists for myself of the things I need to do. Then when I cross out the items, I get this satisfaction and when the list is done I feel a lot better. This is actually one of my strange, er, quirks.

I like to write lists but I leave my room and stuff in chaos. On my phone, everything is organised in folders, then the folders are ordered properly. My wardrobe has to stay neat, so when I can't be bothered to put clothes away, they are just strewn about my room, but the wardrobe stays neat. For the subjects that I care about, my exercise books and notes all have to have a consistent layout and style and by that I mean the date and title go in the same place and are underlined, one line is left and then the work is started, all bullet points have to be the same and for maths, there always has to be a margin, with a width of 2 squares drawn.

It's strange that I have to have things like that, that border OCD or something and I can live in a mess or when I cook in the kitchen it looks like it's been ransacked but I work fine. Also, these aren't really organisation related but they are strange quirks: I can't play tennis but I can play badminton (kind of), I can't play forehand but I can play backhand, I'm relatively smart yet I don't seem to put two and two together - I get these light bulb moments when I finally realise how two concepts link or join or are related or something. Basically, I'm a bit strange and ditzy.