Folks with kids will sometimes talk about how their children teach them things. Patience, unconditional love, a renewed appreciation of “the smaller things in life” - that’s the brand of claptrap they’re usually talking about. That’s fine, all those things are grand.
But check this out:
This photo contains a few subtle indicators that my children have been adding things to the grocery list. The suboptimal handwriting and spelling, the preponderance of ice cream and ice-cream-related products…and, crucially, the positioning of the text.
To wit: it’s at the bottom. (The kids are short, they write where they can reach while standing on a step stool - makes total sense, right?)
So I’m standing in my kitchen one morning, sipping my first cup of coffee and glancing over the grocery list, and it dawns on me: Why on EARTH have I been writing this list from the top down?
For YEARS now that’s how I’ve been doing it. Top-to-bottom, in columns left-to-right.
What do you do when you only have, say, a dozen things on there come time to go to the grocery? Rip the whole thing off? That’s kind of a waste. Just cross off items after they’re transferred to something more portable that I can carry around the grocery store? Sure, but now you’ve kinda got a bin-packing problem - I mean, what do you do if the page fills up before your next trip? (Man I wish I had an alternative pic with “toothpaste” scrawled vertically in the margins in 4-point font…)
My girls solved all this neatly in one fell swoop, by virtue of doing the most-natural possible thing.
Here’s the thing: I started doing it too! Before even realizing I was doing it, or why. I added Kix, Fire Sauce, et al to the list. I put it next to the kids’ ice cream “because that’s where stuff has already been written”…and all of this before having my Moment of Profundity with my morning coffee.
“A leader is best when people barely know she exists, when her work is done, her aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” – Lao Tzu
Just sayin.