Charting habitually: nature or nurture?
Charts and schedules motivate me, sometimes ridiculously so (as I am about to show). Often the intrinsic payoff for accomplishing a task pales beside the fulfillment I feel placing a clean check mark within the lines of that little box on a “to do” list. How can this be a bad thing? During completion of the objectives on a list I have a sense of control; afterward, an indisputable visual proof of progress.
I’ll tell you how it can be a bad thing. For one, my day-to-day self seems slave to someone else, to the occasional part of me that emerges for planning sessions to make charts and “to do” lists during small bursts of discontentment, and lately that part of me has gone too far. Here is a somewhat useful chart I made to develop good habits, but here is a useless chart made to determine what I will eat for breakfast and another for bathroom usage. Here is a “to do” list I made for the current hour.
I’m beginning to think I should seek help for my habitual chart making, but who should pay? If this inclination sprouts from a childhood of chore-charts and, as early as age 7, forced distribution categories for my allowance, the bills will go to my mother. If the chartist in me is genetic, my HMO should cover it.
But it’s almost 7:40, I need to wrap this up, so I can update my charts. I’ll pencil in “attempt resolution to chartist problem” for sometime next week. Soon I’ll check out more charts (and you should too because, seriously, they’re funny)!
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Nice. The charts are very funny.