Each workday I start with a nice clean sheet of note paper which I sully with an ugly list of tasks I have to accomplish. This would be tolerable if I could just finish each item and cross it off. Except it doesn’t work that way; every task I accomplish gives rise to two more. And those give rise to two more. And so on until the list is long enough to publish in a handsome, leather-bound multi-volume set.

On second thought, maybe my life-movie would be Hercules vs. the Hydra. Or perhaps just Sisyphus.

If things don’t improve, my legacy to my children will be a lifetime of indentured servitude while they finish the tasks I never had time to get to. It’s not that I don’t try. I’ve purchased dozens of books on time management and fully intend to read them … as soon as I can find the time.

According to the experts the best thing to do is assign each task to one of four categories; urgent and important, urgent and unimportant, important, but not urgent, and unimportant and not urgent. In the real world these translate into things that will get you fired if you don’t get them done, things people get excited about even though they don’t really matter, things that you ought to do as soon as you can get around to them, and things that will be on your list until the day you die.

Another tip from the experts is to keep a log of how you spend your time and then see what you can eliminate. According to the experts, you really don’t have any clue how you actually spend most of your time.

Really.

Here’s how my typical forty hour work week broke down.

Adding items to my “to-do” list: six hours.

Reading items on my “to-do” list: two hours.

Categorizing items on my “to-do” list: five and one half hours.

Bathroom breaks: one-and-a-quarter hours.

Time spent waving my hands uselessly in front of the automatic, motion-activated faucets and paper towel dispensers: two and one third hours.

Time spent being grateful that the toilet paper dispensers aren’t motion-activated: four and three-eighths hours.

Meetings: twelve hours.

Trading e-mails to schedule meetings: Three and two-tenths hours.

Composing post-meeting follow-up e-mails: fourteen hours and twenty-one minutes.

Thinking about where to have lunch: nine hours and eight minutes.

Eating lunch: three and three-quarter hours.

Suffering indigestion from eating too fast: seven hours and thirty minutes.

Compiling data for the insanely detailed analysis of my work habits: eleven hours and thirteen seconds.

Actually completing the tasks on my “to-do” list: forty-two minutes.

Crossing things off my “to-do” list: forty-two seconds.

Feeling good about my “to-do” list: six-tenths of one second.

The experts were right, I was surprised at how I spent my week. I had no idea I wasted that much time feeling good about the “to-do” list. I also came to realize that I’d be a lot more productive if the company installed manually-operated faucets and paper towel dispensers. With the hours that would save, I’d have more time to add things to my to-do list.

The whole exercise depressed me. All of the stuff I was doing was keeping me from getting to the things on my list. Then the answer hit me. All I had to do to feel better was to change my list to reflect the things I was already doing. If I did that, I’d transform myself from always-behind guy to the King of the “to-do” list.

Except none of the stuff that I actually do counts as urgent/important. So I did what any sensible person would do and threw away the analysis. But I paused long enough to wonder what my analysis might have looked like if I had a different job.

For example, if I were a secret agent (like you see in the movies) my time log might say:

Time spent getting briefed by a cranky superior: two hours.

Traveling to exotic locations: sixteen hours.

Eating extravagant meals in expensive restaurants at taxpayer’s expense: twelve and one-tenth hours.

Wooing beautiful women: thirty-seven and one-half hours.

Exchanging veiled threats with the villain: twenty minutes.

Using cool (and highly improbable) technology: ninety-nine minutes.

Time spent making motion-sensitive bathroom fittings work: two seconds.

Time spent ripping motion-sensitive bathroom fittings off the wall: two minutes.

Defeating the villain: Eighteen very busy minutes.

Of course, a time-log for an actual secret agent would probably look a lot more like my work log with hours devoted to meetings, sending e-mail messages and filing various official documents.

When I showed my analysis to my wife she shrugged and told me about her typical week.

Laundry: Fifteen hours and seventeen minutes (including time for extra loads because her husband tends to leave clothes in places other than the hamper despite the fact that she has told him where it is repeatedly and has gone so far as to pin a red-and-white ringed target to the front.)

Remedial hamper training for husband: Two hours and sixteen minutes.

Preparing menus, shopping lists, shopping for food, and preparing meals: eight hours and forty-six minutes.

Time husband spends over tasty, home-cooked meals: fifty-one minutes.

Balancing the checkbook, paying the bills, and wondering about the fifty-two dollar charge from the video game store and the seventy-six dollar charge from the bookstore: nine hours.

Listening to husband complain about his busy week: four hours and six minutes.

Trying, unsuccessfully, to tell husband that her week was just as busy: three hours, thirty-nine minutes and twenty-two seconds.

She wanted to go on, but I interrupted and stopped her. I’d picked up on the subtle hints she’d been dropping. Like me, she felt overwhelmed by the many demands on her time and nothing I could do or say was going to make her feel any better. I just didn’t have the time.

Aside: my wife is glaring at me with a look that could blister the paint on a battleship. In the interest of avoiding incineration, let me provide a some context.

The doctor in question is my wife’s oh-toe-lair-in …. auto-lauren … octo-linen … ear, nose and throat guy. He decided that she was having trouble with her sinuses, but he said he had a fix for that.

I looked up sinuses on-line to see what he might be talking about. Guess what? Sinuses are just holes in your skull. Sort of like damp, gooey caves hidden behind the bones of your face. So, in essence, the doctor was saying that my wife had holes in her head and that was the problem.

Aside: my wife is staring at me with the same frightening intensity of a buzzard watching the slowest wildebeest in a migrating herd. Let me continue in a more scientific vein.

Sinuses are cavities in the skull which serve three primary functions; they warm and moisten the air we breath, they reduce the overall weight of the skull, and they provide employment for a whole bunch of medical specialists including pharmacists, general practitioners, and (most importantly) surgeons … like my wife’s ear, nose and throat guy.

The whole thing seemed a little suspect to me. Let me review the facts. The sinuses are little cave-like openings in the skull. There was a problem, but the doctor was sure he could solve it by operating. How do you operate on a hole? Did he plan to fill them in? Reupholster them, maybe? Should I have advised my wife to go with a conservative striped fabric or the flashier-but-more-likely-to-look-dated-sooner paisley print?

Aside: my wife is gazing at me in a way that puts me in mind of Cyclops from the X-men. I’ll just get back to the topic at hand, shall I?

Although he presented it in a highly technical manner, the doctor’s plan was that he would shove some kind of flexible device up my wife’s nose and clean out the offending sinus. He didn’t call this surgery, he called it a “procedure”. As far as I’m concerned, a procedure is a set of instructions for doing something straightforward like assembling a spacecraft or disassembling a bomb or unblocking a sink. Speaking of which, it occurs to me that I have a small plumber’s snake and recently performed a similar “procedure” on our kitchen sink when the drain backed up. Maybe we should have saved some money, skipped the surgery and I could have solved the problem with some good, old-fashioned DIY.

Aside: My wife…never mind. On with the story.

The first step to performing surgery is breaking down the patient’s resistance to the idea of willingly subjecting themselves to the “procedure”. The usual approach is to deny the prospective patient food or drink for at least twelve hours. At the end of that time, they’ll be positively anxious to cooperate if it means they’ll eventually be allowed to eat again.

Of course, some patients come back after the surgery — once they’ve been permitted food again — and claim to have had a change of heart. They didn’t really want the surgery, they were just hungry and collaborating with the medical personnel seemed to be the easiest way to get food. To prevent any messy legal entanglements, the healthcare community now requires patients to sign a ream of documents covered in dense gray text printed in a font that would seem small to cockroach.

With all of the formalities taken care of, the patient is whisked away to the humiliation room where they are forced into an unfashionably loose cotton garment before being examined, inspected, poked and prodded. If they’re healthy enough the surgery is declared a “go” and the countdown begins.

In my wife’s case, just before the surgery the anesth …. unesthat … annie-this … guy with the knock-out medicine, came in and told her about all of the drugs he’d be using to make sure she didn’t feel sick when she woke up. He threw around names like Decadron and Zofran. I recognized them both from my years of watching TV. Optimus Prime ordered the Autobots to capture Decadron in the second season. And I’m pretty sure that the Power Rangers had to battle Lord Zofran after he threatened the town of Angel Grove.

Aside: my wife’s giving me “the look” again.

The knock-out doc promised my wife two things; 1) the procedure would almost certainly go well and 2) she’d be in some discomfort when she woke up. I give him points for honesty, but now I know why he went into medicine instead of marketing. I can’t imagine him successfully selling a service with the slogan, “It’ll make you better … but it’s gonna hurt!”

Finally it was time for the actual surgery. My wife handled her part perfectly, falling asleep on cue and then lying quietly. The doctors did a good job too and a couple of hours later I was reunited with my wife in the recovery room where she looked … pretty much the way she had before the surgery. Sadly, sinus surgery isn’t one of those operations where you wind up with a cool scar to show off. The best you can do is point vaguely up your nose and say, “It’s up in there.”

For post-op instructions they told me to take over the routine housework and let my wife rest for a week or so. They also added that she was to avoid lifting heavy objects for a month. Oddly, the definition of heavy objects included such things as toilet brushes, feather dusters, and dish rags. Still, I didn’t mind. I was just glad she was finally going to be right in the head.