Do you find yourself constantly at the wrong side of a never-ending to-do-list? The stress and overwhelm can take a massive toll. Worse, without remedial action we’re doomed to a cycle of overwork, burnout and always needing a holiday.
People often talk about prioritisation as the key to a good life – indeed I’ve even posted around that recently. If we don’t prioritise things, we’ll end up getting spread too thin. No matter what our abilities, we cannot do anything and everything.
But one thing that is less talked about is how we make the process of living our lives far simpler. In other words, how can you make your daily tasks feel far less burdensome, leaving you feeling lighter and in control of your life, rather than being controlled by your tasks.
I once joked to a colleague that the best way I keep on top of my to-do-list is to simply not have one. I said this in jest, and obviously I sometimes do make a note of the things I’ve committed to, but in general I keep my ‘to-do’s’ to as empty as possible.
You might be thinking ‘oh what a luxury, I wish I had such an easy life like you’, and perhaps you’re right. But I also think that we have a far stronger
ability to manage our tasks in our life than we realise.
For example, the reason I can get through life without having a big to-do-list hanging over me is because I tend to deal with things as I see them. A classic case in point are emails. I sometimes look at people’s inboxes and am shocked at how stressful it all looks. Hundreds of emails with no sorting system, leaving a constant sense of never-ending work.
When I get an email, I tend to sort it in my head in three different ways – action, archive or flag. So this means that if an email is for information, I read it and I archive it (the shortcut for this is backspace in Outlook. You can thank me later). If I want to reply, I tend to reply there and then. After which, it is ‘dealt with’, and I can archive it. In the rare occasion I have something I want to dedicate more time to (e.g. to review a document), I will flag it and come back to it. To note, this is fairly rare, and at the moment I only have one flagged document in the whole of my inbox, and the rest of the inbox stays below 10 emails nearly all the time.
Considering we spend most of our time on emails, the shift I made when I read about this as an effective system was life changing. I feel far more in control, and people know that they will get a response from me very quickly. I also save an unbelievable amount of mental energy by not having to return to an email for a second time. When we put emails into a ‘I don’t know what to do with this’ bucket, we tend to return to it and have to spend more mental energy deciding what to do. This accumulates to become extremely draining.
I’ve gone quite specific with the email example, but the truth is that this optimisation can be said of most things. We can make our lives far easier by making the way we respond to them simpler. And the best thing is that you already know how to do this – you’ve already learnt to optimise many things already. Think about when you first learnt to ride a bike or drive a car. It was an arduous task of learning, with intense concentration throughout. Yet as you got better, the skills became automatic. Now you can get to where you want to go without even thinking about it. You also know how to turn on the TV, use the toilet or run a bath. These do not require your active effort.
Within work, when we know we have a discussion to be had with someone, we can just put it in the calendar. That saves us having to hold it in our heads, and gives us peace of mind that we aren’t going to forget anything. Outside of work, many of us have goals of wanting to eat healthier or exercise more. These days, I commit to going to a yoga class when I book it. I don’t overthink it or decide how I’m feeling just before (unless I’m genuinely injured). I plan it, book it, forget about it then check my diary for the day and get dressed and go. I spend little time debating whether I should or not.
The underlying shift is moving to a state of overthinking to one of graceful action, making our tasks feel like we are doing it without putting effort in. The biggest blocker of our activities is when we stop to think about them too much. How often have you found yourself putting off something you feel you need to do, only to find it not that bad when you actually do it?
Fundamentally, there is an immense power in realising that our thoughts do not have to dictate our reality. When we think something might be hard, we might be tempted to succumb to that idea. But these are thoughts, and the reality of it can be drastically different.
But this is also not saying that we should just simply try to block out thoughts – that doesn’t tend to work too well either. It’s very hard to actively stop thinking about something. Instead, it’s accepting that our thoughts are just that – thoughts. They can help, but they can also hinder. We have thousands of thoughts everyday, most of which we let drift away harmlessly. But the moment we fixate on the idea of all the things we feel we need to do, we suddenly give these thoughts an incredible power over us. This can leave us in debilitating anxiety.
So my invitation to you is to find ways in which you can shift your activities to this state of graceful action, rather than one of paralysing overthink. Even a small change can make a massive difference to your life.
If you’d like to explore more around this idea of changing our relationship with thoughts, drop me a message.