The to-do list might be the secret to willpower, and it is certainly an essential tool of creativity, as anyone from Leonardo da Vinci to John Lennon can attest. After peeking at the notebooks and sketchbooks of some of history’s greatest creators, here comes a rare glimpse of 41-year-old Thomas Edison’s to-do list circa 1888, found in The Papers of Thomas A. Edison: Losses and Loyalties — the seventh volume of Rutgers University’s digitized Edison papers.

Among Edison’s “things doing and to be done,” while he wasn’t busy inventing and scandalizing cinema, were:

• Cotton picker
• New standard phonograph
• Hand turning phonograph
• Deaf apparatus
• Electrical piano
• New expansion pyromagnetic dynamo
• Artificial silk
• Phonographic clock
• Marine telegraphy
• Chalk battery
• Ink for blind

So: What are you doing today?