Using an Itch List

Items that aren’t important until you ignore them

I recently started keeping two lists in my journal. One, the wish list, is simple enough. My wish list is physical items I’ve been wanting to buy, so I can either keep an eye out for a good deal, or decide if I want them after all. My second one I don’t think a lot of people have, though: my itch list.

An itch list is so named because they’re things that have started to bug me. They — metaphorically — itch. Sometimes they’re forks, annoying things that need to happen and take up mental load until they get done, and crossing them out feels nice. But more often than not, they’re items that appear to fall outside the bounds of an Eisenhower Matrix.

Hanging a picture on a wall is neither urgent nor important, so does it simply never happen? Nothing — except, perhaps, the imminent arrival of your in-laws — will make that task feel urgent or important enough to happen. But it probably should, or you wouldn’t have bought the frame.

Tasks that have entered my itch list have included things like hanging pictures, cleaning the oven, organizing my digital photos, and taking care of family administration like passport applications. The common denominator on my itch list is that none of the items are urgent and important, but likely would become so at an inconvenient time that approaches faster the longer I ignore the task.

Cleaning the oven did not make it onto a weekly to-do list once in three years… but if my oven caught fire, that would suck, and I’d pay for ignoring it.

I never have to clean out my office closet, but the door didn’t shut for a month and I had to blur my Zoom background to handle the mess.

Letting passport applications become urgent can mean missing out on that international vacation because it wasn’t filed soon enough.

Even things like revamping my editing logo and going through my templates make this list. They’re not urgent or important, but they need done even though they’re not.

In a lot of ways, my itch list feels like what happens when “delegate” isn’t an option. People who are often delegated to rarely have the luxury to be the ones to delegate. The things that would otherwise be delegated still need done, but the order isn’t important. Often, they’re items that fit into the cracks of my day — scheduling an appointment while in the pick-up line, filling out forms when my brain can’t properly edit another word — and it doesn’t matter which order I do them in. I put “complete 10 itch list items” on my February goals list, and managed it. I’m trying for two a week in March, now that a lot of them are done.

What do you do with tasks that are neither urgent nor important — yet? Delegate them, ignore them, or create a plan for them?