I'm actively avoiding about a dozen things I need to do. In my practicing, I have two recital programs staring me in the face and a third one halfway under my hands. I desperately need to sit down and do some long-range planning for my students. I've got several essays that need some serious revisions. I haven't been to the music store to browse through new music since last summer. I am not proud of this fact, but I have been doing everything possible to avoid this task for months now. My yard needs attention: there are still piles of leaves we didn't bag last fall and if I have any hope of staying on top of the weeding this spring I need to get out there. Soon.

This winter I read a book called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. The author maintains that any excuse we use not to do the things we are supposed to do should be labeled what it really is: resistance. We should not give any attention or weight to the creative excuses we come up with to avoid our work, but rather call it what it is and treat it as such. I am dubious about this idea, even while recognizing that there may possibly be a grain of truth behind it. I like hiding behind the plausible excuses I create instead of facing down the things that need to be done.

But I do know one thing: unfinished projects, unanswered phone calls, and half-read books become psychological clutter and weigh me down over time. Even hidden from view, they can make me feel like I am juggling too many things at once. It is true that they take up psychological and emotional space–even the most harmless ones. Another author has a different method of approaching this baggage. In Getting Things Done, business coach and organizational expert David Allen writes about how the path to a focused and creative mind is in better organizing the details of one's life. Things that we don't have a place for or a strategy to conquer drag us down, he says, and take up mental space that could be used for more creative endeavors. While a business approach to anything would normally make me run screaming, I find myself nodding my head in agreement. It is the dozens of half-baked ideas, partly done plans, half-finished projects that make me crazy. It's not knowing and not bothering to figure out the next step of a long-term project that makes me squirm. It's the piles of information that I have no strategy for keeping, organizing, or accessing later. It's the dozens of random tasks that I try to keep current in my short-term memory until I have managed to accomplish them. They are the problem. Allen has a complex system to solving all these problems and more, only part of which I can manage to employ. But if there is one strategy that I am willing to adopt, it is the idea that all the little things fill up space -- literal and figurative. Writing thing down and keeping better track of all our work and play, big and small, we can keep these things from taking over our lives.

In spite of my avoidance of too many things, I am more aware of what I am avoiding, thanks to these books. I make lists and more lists, scribbling ideas, jobs, and thoughts down in a notebook and on random pieces of paper as they come to me. Buy door hooks, Pick up dry cleaning, Get disinfectant might be on the same list as Look up Clementi Sonatina for Kristen, Listen to the Schubert, Finish reviewing articles. Also, mixed into such tasks are personal things: Call Missy, Send Sarah's birthday card, Coffee with Anne? Surely such lists are a window into the organizational habits of a person, as well as evidence of our priorities and values. In addition to list making, I am experimenting this year with keeping a calendar–something I am generally very resistant to. In December I visited the bookstore at least four times searching for the perfect calendar for my peculiar method of keeping track of my life. Each time I came home empty handed. "What's wrong with them?" Matt would ask. "You don't like the fact the dates are in order?"

My alternative medicine-migraine therapist once teased me about my tendency to write down random engagements in any haphazard sequence. When I relayed this exchange to Matt he said, "Now doesn't that scare you that your spooky chick woman thinks your method is strange?" Mostly it scares me that despite otherwise solid upbringing and breeding, I could manage to be so resistant against rather convention methods of organization.

Getting things done or not, I am working steadily on a list of tasks to avoid today: yet another day without going to the music store, I probably won't get very far on recital programs #2 or #3, and there is no way I am going to look up any Clementi Sonatina. David Allen would not consider this a productive day, Pressfield would label my actions resistance, but there are only so many places I can straighten up and fly right. I have no doubt that the world would function more efficiently if we would all adopt the strategies outlined in these books. Surely, wars would end, the stock market would never crash, production in every area would skyrocket. However, there has to be a balance, and truthfully what my soul most needs today is not another strategy for handcuffing myself to my schedule and productivity, but rather a playful dose of spontaneity. I need not more restrictions in my life, but a more expansive and abundant sense of the possibilities. For all the days I need help getting things done, I equally need help letting go of the pride and ego satisfaction I get from being overly efficient. I need to let go of the notion that my self-worth is tied up in how many items I cross off my to-do lists or that I will somehow be a better human being if I can find ways to get more things done. For all the ways these books provide new ideas and solutions for old habits of living, they also provide fuel to the raging fire of my identity as a person that is too busy already.

As I ponder this paradox, I browse through David Allen's book and find staring at me this quote by James Michener: "The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both." Maybe there is no need for a balancing act after all. Maybe I have been drawing a line in the sand that need not exist. Maybe, just maybe, there is room for everything: the highly productive person deeply engaged in the work and play of her life.