Member-only story

Problems Are a Bucket, Not a List

Aaron Pace
6 min readFeb 16, 2025

--

Photo by Galen Crout on Unsplash

I rolled over and looked at my clock.

2:42 am.

Nobody should be awake at that unholy hour, but I’d been lying there for a while, trying to think of a reason I couldn’t just go back to sleep already.

My Oura ring tracks my sleep. It regularly tells me how bad I am at getting an adequate amount which sometimes adds to my brain’s resistance to sleep.

3 hours, 21 minutes.

Too many nights lately, my ring has decided I’m just taking a long nap instead of actually, you know, sleeping.

My to-do list is long:

  • 40 separate, work-related projects.
  • A house that’s 21 years old and, let’s face it, they don’t build ’em like they used to.
  • Exercise? Not happening.
  • Eating right? Maybe next week.

My to-do list is like a rope made up of a thousand strands, each one frayed at the end, and I’m trying to snip them one at a time with a dull pair of those tiny travel-sewing-kit scissors.

Futile.

There’s no finish line, no moment when the last thing gets checked off, the last email gets sent, and I get to put my completed to do list in a drawer, never to be touched again. The list is always going to regenerate…

--

--

Aaron Pace
Aaron Pace

Written by Aaron Pace

Married to my best friend. Father to five exuberant children. Fledgling entrepreneur. Writer. Software developer. Inventory management expert.

No responses yet