My iPhone wallpaper has six words from Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet:
There were these things to do.
I first read Hatchet in elementary school. Back then, I loved the survival story. A kid, Brian, alone in the Canadian wilderness with a hatchet seemed impossibly cool. It fed every idea I had about becoming a rugged outdoorsman, despite having no evidence that I’d be any good at it.
I’ve reread the book what feels like a thousand times.
As an adult, I read those six words differently. Brian has work to do because the work keeps him alive. He needs food, fire, shelter and tools. Gary Paulsen returns to the sentence as Brian stops waiting for rescue to solve everything and starts dealing with what is in front of him.
The tasks occupy him. They also move him forward.
My version is smaller and safer
I’m not comparing an exhausting evening at home to a teenager surviving a plane crash. The danger isn’t remotely the same, but the connection is the frame.
Some evenings I come home from work already tired and find a second shift waiting. There’s food to make, a house that needs attention and people who need help. After the house gets quiet, the projects I want to build are still sitting on the computer.
I handle the immediate need, then the next one. Eventually I run out of time.
That last part matters because I don’t reach the bottom of the list and feel satisfied. The clock stops me. Whatever is left still feels like failure, even when I handled the work that mattered most.
There were these things to do.
The sentence gives me no finish line. It tells me to keep moving.
A survival list is not a productivity system
I use Todoist and Obsidian. Every morning I pull a few tasks onto the handwritten page that runs my day. I have enough systems to sort, schedule and remember more work than I could finish in a month.
Brian doesn’t need a better system. His order is obvious because necessity keeps making the decision. Tend the fire. Find food. Improve the shelter. Make a tool, discover that it doesn’t work and make a better one.
Ordinary life is less clear, but the principle still helps me. The whole list can turn into one heavy object if I stare at it long enough. The quote breaks it apart. There is this thing to do. Then there is another.
The wording is important. Paulsen doesn’t write that there was everything to do. There were these things. A real set of work in front of Brian, not every possible problem at once.
I need that distinction more than I need another method for ranking tasks.
The part I have not solved
The line keeps me from stalling. That’s why it’s on my phone, where I’ll see it whether I’m ready for another task or not. I look at the words, start moving and do what comes next.
But there’s a cost to treating motion as survival. If doing is what keeps me going, stopping can feel dangerous. Rest starts to look like neglect. An unfinished task feels less like a scheduling problem and more like proof that I failed.
I don’t have a clean answer for that. Too often, I keep working until time makes the decision for me. Pretending otherwise would turn a useful sentence into another tidy productivity rule that falls apart on a real night.
Brian never gets to clear a list. His work keeps changing because staying alive keeps producing new work. He survives by returning to the next job.
I understand that in the book more easily than I accept it in my own life.
Why I keep rereading it
As a student, I wanted to know whether Brian would make it. As an adult, I notice how he makes it from one moment to the next.
Effort doesn’t always feel good in this book, and the work keeps coming. That is why the sentence helps on nights when my obligations arrive faster than my energy.
If you haven’t read Hatchet since school, you can find it through my Bookshop.org shop. The survival story still works. The six-word sentence inside it works differently once you have a life full of people, work and unfinished plans.
My wallpaper gives me no guarantee that everything will work out. It gives me somewhere to point when the whole list starts looking like one impossible thing.
There were these things to do.
I pick one and keep going.
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