What have you done today?
How long is it today?
You know what I mean.
Your To Do List.
I'll bet you have one. On paper, on your phone, in your head. Maybe all three at once.
It's good to have a list. It means you won't forget all those important things you have to do.
No, they will always be there, in black and white. Quietly menacing. Pricking at your conscience when you take a break. Swelling, multiplying throughout the day. And the week.
And the year, if you are anything like me.
Well, I am bound to change the filter in the vacuum cleaner sometime. Surely? 
A To Do list can be a really useful tool to help us manage our lives. But sometimes it has the opposite effect. Our lists become a millstone around our necks. Life becomes one long series of chores, one after another after another. And the worst thing? We never, ever seem to get done. At the end of every day, we have always achieved a little - or a lot - less than we planned.
We start each day (against all experience) in hopeful mood. Today, today is going to be the day we get all those things done.
Work - CHECK. Laundry - CHECK. Bills - CHECK. Exercise - CHECK. Eat properly - CHECK.
I won't bore you with the 20 million other things I could put on that list. You know what they are already.
And then we get to the end of the day. And we haven't done it. Again. We feel like Big Fat Failures.
But we are stuck. We don't know how to make ourselves...do better. So we go to bed miserable, and wake up the next morning stressed, and start the whole sorry rigmarole over again.
If we're this bad when we are trying to be organised, what on Earth would we be like without our lists?
But hang on just a minute. Isn't there something about all this goal-setting that is...well...a bit depressing? Go on. Take a look at your list. Is there any chance it's a bit...long? A good way to judge it is this - would you give it to your friend, as a model of how to spend her day?
For those of us who are of a perfectionistic bent (and so many of us here at EP are), a Too-Long To Do List can be a real problem. Instead of helping us get more organised, it can actually stop us achieving our goals. Here's how:
You get up. You look at your interminable list. You add a couple of things you remembered in the night. You worry you might have forgotten something.
You worry about the order you are going to do it in.
Eventually, you start doing the first few things.
And then you panic. You can't face it all.
You think you're lazy. But you're not. You're panicking because there is way too much stuff on that list to get done.
You aren't a machine. You're a human being. However much you want to, however necessary you find it, you are never going to be 100 - or even 70 - per cent efficient. Things are going to go wrong. And sometimes, you are going to blow off doing something just because you can. Or because you're stressed. In short, your To Do list is never going to get done. And that is really hard to accept. Because it is absolutely vital that those things get done, right?
Errr...well. Did you finish your list on any day in your life so far?
But you're still alive, right?
Let's think about our diets. So many of us have defined rules for how we are going to eat:
No more than 1500 calories. No soda. No bread when we eat out. 5 portions of fruit and veg a day.
But what happens when we break one of these rules? Say our slim friend wants to go for cake.
Do we brush ourselves down afterwards, say, 'no biggie' and carry on? Or do we get pizza for dinner because we 'blew it now anyway'?
Do we even get that far? Or do our rules stress us out so much that we call for the pizza just to shut up the voice in our heads yelling 'I can't do this'? After all, if we overeat, the worst will already have happened, so we can stop worrying for a bit.
And we can always start again tomorrow.
Now look at life without those rules: You go out for cake with your friend. That is a normal, social thing to do.
You go home. You don't plan to skip dinner. It doesn't matter that you had those extra calories - it is a rare enough event. You cook a normal, healthy dinner.
Maybe the next day you are up 0.2lb on the scale. But if you had the pizza? And ice cream? And wine? Maybe 2lb. And you'd feel really demotivated, too.
Lists of goals are great. They help us know where we want to go. But if you don't feel successful, it is worth considering the possibility that the problem lies with your lists, not with you.
If you are setting goals, they will work best if they are just small improvements on what you already do. Then when you meet them, you can try something new.
And always remember that rules are guidelines. They are there to work for you - not the other way around.
There are many self-help books available on how to make goal-setting work for you.
Reading them is number 472 on my To Do list.
But here is a different idea. Today, instead of a To Do list, why not try making a Done List?
Seriously. For one day, forget what you think you have to do and just live your life. Over the course of the day, jot down everything you actually do. It can be quite liberating. Even if you think you've achieved 'nothing', you can look back and see that you actually did quite a lot.
Strangely, making a Done list might even help you become more productive. It is easier to start something when you don't have the pressure of the next 100 tasks building up behind it. You know you can stop at any time - which can actually make you less likely to do so.
And I'll bet you won't forget any of the really important stuff, either.
You can decide what you want to do with your day - rather than feeling pressured by time.
You can feel proud every time you achieve something - rather than guilty because you didn't meet some impossible standard.
You can reclaim your leisure time for relaxation and enjoyment - rather than spending it worrying about what comes next.
Most importantly, you can start to re-evaluate how you measure your life and your achievements.
You can stop simply moving from one task to the next, and start living instead.
Have a lovely day - however you choose to use it.
Rach xxx 
. That is going to be a sad day, but the Lord will be with me and still I will offer up my chores and my to do's to Him. He gives me today and tomorrow and eternity.