The original Life List ☑️
I’ve had my Life List Trello board since 2014. Here’s the usual spiel about that:
When wandering around Kraków, Poland, on my own in 2014, having just ticked off another country, and visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, I wanted to record a “Bucket List” or Life List.
I wanted to create it online, somewhere that was always accessible to me wherever in the world I was, and where I could host it in public for accountability, for suggestions, and to get help from my friends and peers to achieve my goals.
✅I realised that I over the last year or two, I’d barely been updating it. I had all my long-term goals on there - big tasks broken down into many checklists, and smaller achievable tasks, all in one big “TO DO” list.
The only time I ever went on the board was months after an event when I remembered to move it into the big “DONE” list.
I didn’t visit it to get ideas for what to do next and to be inspired. I didn’t visit it to see what was coming up, what the next big thing could be and be motivated to work towards it.
📋New lists
To invigorate the list and myself, I came up with the idea of creating a new, more organised set of lists:
- 1-year,
- 2-year,
- 5-year,
- 8-year goals.
These are what I think I can achieve within another 1, 2, 5, and 8 years - not achieve by 17/02/2022, 17/02/2023, 17/02/2026, 17/02/2029…
I went from this:| TO DO | DOING: ONGOING | DOING: THIS YEAR | DONE |
|---|---|---|---|
Everything ever | A bunch of things | A few more things | Loads of things |
| 1 year | 2 years | 5 years | 8 years | DONE |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Things I could get done right away | Not too far distant future things | Some medium-term things to achieve | Some quite ambitious, long-term things | Loads of things, still proud of this list |
Much cleaner and more organised!
🗓️What’s next?
Wherever and whenever I am, I’ll always be looking to the 1-year list for what I can achieve imminently, and items from the other lists will be edging closer as I tick off what I do.
I kept a clone of my Life List private for a while so I could figure out how I wanted it and could get used to the idea. Now I’ve updated the original to reflect this way of organisation.
👉🏼My 1/2/5/8 life board
🎯It’s more clearly defined for me now - instead of a big pile of “TO DO” tasks I have yearly goals and look to the future and see what’s coming up next. I suppose I should look into getting that tattoo…
I still have the big “DONE” list. I’m proud of that one.