Sure, there's the obvious comparison, that the latter two are not reality, and reality is closer to a stream of consciousness than the latter two are*, but I often wonder whether we view life as more of a series of tasks just to make things manageable.
I suppose the most obvious form of that is how games and stories --particularly in Fantasy-- emphasize the quest as basically a task manager.
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| From Matthew Willis and swordscomic.com. Also from the BBC. |
When I used to keep track of my work activities in a daily calendar** about 30 years ago, I never looked at it as a "Quest Log", but in it's own way it was. Even today, while I don't keep a formal to-do list, I run over all of the things I'm supposed to do in a given day and set about doing them. You know, things like "do a load of the laundry", "cut the grass", and "write a blog post"***.
Okay, cutting the grass might not happen since we're supposed to have rain today, but the other two are getting done.
Is this us attempting to make sense of the world and cutting down to easily serviceable tasks, or did we train ourselves to do this because we looked at what we did in video games and books and thought "You know what, we could do something like this in real life!" Either way, I think Franklin Planner is making a lot of money on this.
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| From Wikipedia on Franklin Planner. |
*Although my reading of Mrs. Dalloway for an English seminar at university might beg to differ about the "stream of consciousness" part.
**I had so many things to do in a day, I was lucky if I got about half of them done in about 12 hours.
***That's mainly a "during Blaugust" thing. Admittedly, I start writing after 9 PM when I remember that I ought to write a post.
#Blaugust2026
I'm pretty sure "To Do" lists go back as far as the invention of writing. I imagine just about everyone keeps a mental list of things they have to do. I always have. i can't see how you'd get through the day without one unless you were, as more than one friend of mine did in the eighties, trying to emulate Luke Rhinehart's The Dice Man.
ReplyDeleteThese days, though, I do need to write stuff down. My memory isn't reliable enough any more. I just scribble notes on loose pieces of paper, though. I don't use calendars, journals, spreadsheets, anything. And mostly I don't look at the pieces of paper, either.
Apparently versions of to-do lists have been around since ancient times, but the more modern incarnations have Benjamin Franklin as the Godfather of listing out daily activities for self-improvement purposes, while business consultants at the turn of the 20th century promoted them for productivity improvements (because OF COURSE they'd do that).
DeleteMaybe it's because we see them so frequently in video games as a player aid that I've kind of attached the lists to video games. When I played Ultima IV and V back in the day, I kept a notebook to keep track of all the "quests" in game, while they weren't explicitly quests in the modern sense, they were tasks I had to accomplish.