To-Do Lists

Is anyone good at to-do lists?

I'm certainly not the best. I make myself do most of the unpleasant things I do because I feel they need to be done. Mostly these involve tasks like cleaning up, cooking, planning, and personal health. That doesn't make them pleasurable or even immediately necessary.

To-do lists are one of those things that I am excellent at making but not very good at checking off. I feel like the biggest weakness for me in that respect is simply priorities. To be honest, I don't have solid priorities. I have tons of them coming at me from a thousand directions, but internally, I am lost.

There are things I have to do, or face punishment from work. My job has the capacity to completely control all of my time, down to the minutes I sleep and when I use the toilet. Fortunately, we are given a small amount of personal responsibility. Unfortunately, sometimes our priorities are dictated to us. I'm not talking about work-related tasks; I mean when we clean our rooms and what our goals for personal health are.

Hazard of working for the government.

My to-do list include appointments, work, chores, cleaning, and dates with my boyfriend. It also tends to include things like PHA (annual doctor check up), random call-ins, paperwork deliveries.

I feel like imposed to-do lists are nonsense, and take away from my ability to take control and responsibility for my own self. How do we deal with some other person (not a God/diety/supreme being) having utter control over every aspect of our lives?

I do try to plan... but when everything is constantly disrupted, I get discouraged.