Don't Leave Space to Think

Or, what does "Finding the right amount of overwhelm" look like?

Two weeks ago, I was on fire with thoughts on tool creation and usage to make life feel productive.

Last week, my dog started having breathing problems and generally acting like he was going to die.

It’s funny how seeing someone else suffering can mess with your head. Yes, even a dog.

I love that dog, he’s not that old, he has no reason to be terminal (and he might not be) and seeing him become lethargic hit me “right in the feels.” It left my week feeling pretty depressed and pointless.

My dog’s second-biggest activity right now is walking into a room and just staring off into space, otherwise he’s sleeping wherever he can get comfortable.

Lately I find myself doing the same. Just havin’ a think while staring into the void.

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Thinking is great, except when it isn’t

Last week, mortality was an easy topic to consider, I found myself allowing space to pontificate on the meaning of life, or just the meaning of activities.

No, I didn’t come away with any big epiphanies. What I did come away with the recurring understanding that sometimes I think too much.

I wrote in the past about needing to find the Right Amount of Too Much to Do, and I’m now visiting the subject again.

I’ve always found the greatest sense of accomplishment, the strongest ‘happiness’ at work when I had a product launch looming and just enough things on my plate that to get them done in the near future.

I’m happiest when I’m too busy to think about what I’m working on. I need to think about ‘right now’ without getting wrapped around the axle of a long term vision.

With my constant shifting of priorities in my writing and my journey of self-employment, I find it easy to not commit, to not set a deadline and to not have too much to do. Instead, I find myself with enough whitespace on my calendar to ruminate.

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How do you manage time when you’re time-blind?

As I consider what a “Channeling Chaos Life Management System” might look like, I’m reminded that a key component is having something in place that allows you to skip the thinking and get to the doing.

I need something to track all the things I want and need to do. I also need something that helps me manage these tasks based on my priorities… it needs to prioritize what I’m doing. But really, I need it to remove my need to think about my next steps.

The idea of time-blindness seems absurd to me, as I imagine it does to many, but it is very real. But what does it look like? It means “5 more minutes on this thing” or “I’ll just do this one more thing” and not seeing how these add up.

It’s what allows us to hyper-focus and do something for hours, forgetting to eat.

It’s it also allows us to not start something because we think this distraction isn’t taking that long.

So, it’s important to have a system in place that makes you time aware.

This isn’t rocket surgery. We ALL need a handful of things, some of them just have to be a bit more heavy-handed when getting through my layers of “neurodiversity.”

Some things that normal people use, but that I make excuses to not use:

• Calendar - “Just use time-blocking!” Yeah, that’s only interesting for so long, then I stop caring. Or I get out of sync once, then it starts to feel less effective.

• A Task List - “You’ll get dopamine from checking the boxes.” Honestly, when I can remember to make one, it is helpful. But I lose the list, or make overly complicated tasks, or overly specific.

• Post Its - One task per sheet, it’s a bit more tactile to-do list. Moveable to let you arrange by priority

• White Board - A place to easily mind map or to see the vision more easily.

I’m doing my best to get past the excuse stage and recognize that, even though I lean into this ADHD thing, there is a way to make any of these tools work for me.

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The Morning Routine Redux

No need to belabor what I’ve talked about so much lately, but I’m pulling back all the things that worked 6 months ago. They worked then, life and perspective shifted their usage, but it doesn’t mean they were bad, just that I went through a season of handling things differently.

You don’t expect to see tools being useful differently when you’re a solopreneur than when you were in a corporate nest with teammates around you.

As I close in on the 12 months since the layoff, I see that I’ve shifted a lot. I recognize that I had a whole system of behaviors that were either there to manage reporting to someone else, to stave off boredom or burnout, and now they get directly in the way of my success.

So, I’m back on the wagon. Morning journaling, weekly planning, gratitude journaling, consistent meditation and yoga. I’m filling my time with useful, productive, mindful tasks as I see how essential to my life in the past.

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I’m sorry to have missed last week. Man, it was a rough week. I spent way too much time considering the “why” question in “why bother” context. I’m breathing big breaths today. Practicing the ‘catch and release’ method for my errant thoughts, feeling more optimistic than I have in a little while.

I hope to talk a bit more about those tools above during the Channeling Chaos session later. I feel like there are so many tools out there that can be harnessed for distracted, chaotic brains, so now I just need to bring them all together.

Namaste