2008年12月真题短文2

Many days seem to bring numerous tasks and responsibilities . All of which apparently must be tackled right away. You spend a day putting out files, but by the end of the day, you haven’t accomplished any of the really important things you set out to do.

In desperation , you draft a “to-do” list, but most days, you can make little progress with it. When you look at the list each morning, a big fat cloud of doom is right at the top. Those difficult, complex, important tasks, that are so crucial to get done, and so easy to avoid. Plenty of us create a “to-do” list to address feelings of being overwhelmed,

but we rarely use these tools to their best effect. They wind out being guilt-provoking reminders of the fact that will over-committed and losing control of our priorities . According to Timothy Pikle, a professor of psychology at Carlton University in Ottawa, people often draw up a “to-do” list, and then that’s it. The list itself becomes the day’s achievement, allowing us to feel we’ve done something useful without taking on any real work.

In fact, drawing up the list becomes a way of avoiding the work itself . Too often, the list is seen as the accomplishment for the day, reducing the immediate guilt of not working on the tasks at hand by investing energy in the list, says Pikle. When a list is used like this,

it's simply another way in which we lie to ourselves .