I was struck today by a thread from Floh Gro on Mastodon that starts like this:

Have you ever looked at your queue of podcasts 🎧, watchlist 📺, and read later queue 📚 and felt overwhelmed? It can be stressful to see a long list of things you still need to get done. What if we shift our perspective and see these lists as things to enjoy, rather than things to do?

Maybe this isn’t a problem many people have, but I tend to turn everything in my life into a to-do list. Not just my actual tasks for work, but podcasts I want to listen to, people I need to reach out to, even taking care of my body. (My habit tracker Awesome Habits is basically a to-do list for self-care.)

I benefit from this tendency in a lot of ways. It keeps me productive, focused, and mostly on top of things. It’s how I cope with the world, and it saves me from a lot of stress. But there are some instances when it’s also inappropriate.

When it comes to my downtime, I need to learn to actually relax. It’s okay if my podcast queue builds up a little bit. Or if it takes me a while to get around to reading that article I saved for later. These are things I’m meant to savor, not consume as quickly as possible so that I can check them off and move on to the next one.

Some things aren’t supposed to be checklists. That’s something I needed to hear today. Maybe someone else needs to hear it, too. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a growing Up Next queue in my TV app to work through—I mean, enjoy.