8 High-Annoyance, High-Reward Tasks You Should Just. Get. Done.

100% real To Do list

It’s summer, and chances are your routine is changing a little bit. It’s supposed to be the happiest season of the year, but maybe you feel inexplicably bogged down with stuff. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out exactly what’s doing it, so to aid you in your summery transition I’ve made a To Do list. Get going on it, results guaranteed or your money back! (Ed. note: invisible money has, in fact, exchanged hands.)

1. Throw out your old underwear.

Shriek shriek shriek shriek!

(See, similar but less pressing: Old and/or randomly pair-free socks)

Not trying to gross you out, reader, but everyone forgets to toss out underwear. It’s not like you grow out of them (sigh, if only every garment we wore could be elasticized, we could all be a little less stressed, and probably fatter) plus they’re such hamper-dwelling items as is.  But the day inevitably comes when you take a look, reeeally look at your underwear collection and begin to realize how much shit they’ve been through (high five!)

So here’s your litmus test: Hold up each pair, and if they look like they’ve fought in a war, toss ‘em. Toss them. Fucking toss them. Do not donate your wounded, scarred panty-soldiers to anyone/anything anywhere.

2. Take the important objects out of your bag, turn the whole thing upside down and shakeshakeshake into a trash can.

But wait, you really need the tobacco flakes from 14 crushed cigarettes down there! Ditto receipts and all those coins — you probably have enough coins in your bag to make all your wishes come true via flipping them into a fountain and piss off a clerk somewhere and join the army of Nader voters who think the penny should be discontinued. And who are you kidding with that condom! You should carry at least three more just in case.

3. Oh yeah, and maybe get a real trash can.

Does not count.

4. Figure out what the hell you’re doing with your hair.

As my adorable Hungarian relatives might say if they ever met you, “Vat ees thees herstyle you vear?” But really, whatchoo doin? Bangs or no bangs? Long or short? You should probably make that decision. Also I can see your split ends from here; they are woefully spiky and reaching out to me like something in Alien vs. Predator. It’s the summer, get yourself a trim and move on with life.

5. Delete random contacts out of your phone.

(See, similar: Deleting buddies off AIM buddy list, or Gchat contacts if your name is 2009ey Deschanel)

You can suss out the good ones based on whether the info is entered all wrong (a solid indicator that your phone was hijacked by some bumbly person with kielbasas for fingers) or if the name is incomplete. Personal favorites that I definitely don’t need anymore:

• GaBriEL — Wh…what? He must work for dELiA*s or something. I’m scared if I try calling this it’ll redirect me to a Xanga page full of blog poetry and anorexic people with Azn mullets.
• apt dude – Sup dude, heard you have an apartment. Pass.
• Skype — 000123456. Excuse me, I have to call Skype now. The whole company. Hope the CEO doesn’t mind that I just posted his direct extension here.

See what I’m gettin’ at? Surely you have some of your own to erase.

6. Toss all those vitamins you bought, never took, and allowed to expire in your medicine cabinet.

It's 2009!

Space in your med. cab. is so precious, how could you allow those Vitamin D gel caps sit there for three whole years? Back when you bought them you promised yourself you’d take them every day, and that 2009 expiration date felt like eons into the future. I thought that by the year 2009 there’d be a wind turbine on every streetcorner, holograms of Will.I.Am on the news and a robo-narrator ominously prefacing everything with “In the year 2009…”

Buuut as it turns out, your vitamins are still sitting here and all we got was that stupid Will.I.Am hologram.  So maybe you blew it, but damn does it feel cool to flush them down the toilet — just like Girl Interrupted lol!

7. Dig out your old (not old like childhood old, but recent-old) journals, reread them and DESTROY! DESTROY!

We all go through phases where we think keeping a journal is a great idea. I mean, you’re a really reflective person, so why not write about your day and how strange it can be to watch your parents age? Unfortunately, like vitamins, the journal-keeping habit is a hard one to genuinely cement, and in the wake of your vagary is a sprinkling of composition books and stupid-expensive Moleskines throughout your bookshelf.

Open any of them and you’ll notice a pattern: the first page is all THIS IS MY GURNAL ME ME ME and maybe you wrote 1-5 entries before you got absorbed by Vh1 clip shows and left about 80% of it blank. Oh, the other pattern you’ll notice is that whatever you wrote was fucking horrifying and if anyone ever found it you’d die. Your mom/roommate/sibling probably has already, so might as well cut your losses and set them on fire.

8. Make your Facebook photos private (if you’re under 30.)

By the time my childhood best friend’s mom Added Me As A Friend, I couldn’t help thinking that she doesn’t need to see 649 pictures of me that together create a fascinatingly inaccurate narrative of my college career. Photos from real life have a greater likelihood of being PG and representative of you as a person, but camera-carriers on campus? Pretty crapshooty. My highly precise scientific findings indicate that college kids who take photos and post them to Facebook are:

• Found at parties, especially themed and/or shitty and/or sweaty ones
• Probably not your real friends.

Of course there are exceptions to both points, and in the abyss of photos there are a few I actually really love. Luckily I can still look at them when the mood strikes and not lose sleep wondering how my former basketball coach is interpreting the Eurotrash night photos or the time we publicly and retardedly staged a clothed version of the Eiffel Tower. Privacy settings, y’all. They’re good to use.

Oops, yeah, probably don't need to spread this one around the Internet...oh, fucking oops again.

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Anyway, do all of these things and I promise you’ll feel like weight has been lifted out of your pants. They’re not particularly fun, but you’ll be glad you took care of shit. The More You Know, or something.