End Points

Thanksgiving week has given me a very empty whiteboard where my wife and I record our weekly appointments every Sunday.  Dentist and OLLI class on Monday, then Thanksgiving.  No other fixed appointments.  My weekly list of things I either intend to do or hope to maybe do remains as long as ever but absence of appointments means I can direct my attention to a few, particularly those with firm end points that never reappear on these lists once completed.  Those One and Dones.

It's not always straightforward when many of my desired tasks reach completion, though.  If I clean the kitchen, isn't there always one more thing I could have done?  Go fishing but when I have achieved adequate recreation by doing it?  End points are sometimes elusive.  I can check off when each Medscape submission reaches the editor or when I've made my monthly donations to Jewish causes.  If I set myself a target of reading two chapters a day from The Book of Mormon, I know when the task can be checked off that day, though not for that week.

So much of what I perform has short term finite completion criteria but often stay on with another intermediate landmark to prod me along the next day or the next week, often indefinitely.  Most projects, though, go better with some defined end point, at least for that day, but a surprisingly large fraction lack even that guideline.  We do what we can measure.