I’ve been feeling overwhelmed lately. Like I have too many things to do. Like I’m forgetting something important. It took me a while to figure out why that was, and I want to tell you this story.
I was playing with Google’s Notebook LM, as one does. I gave it all the tasks off of my Todoist to see what it would do. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. When I started working with it, however, I realised that I chose the Todoist tasks because that was what made me feel overwhelmed. I had about seven hundred items on it, and I didn’t even know how to approach that mountainous terrain. I reflected more on this and realised that I felt daunted even opening my task list, which is not a great place to be.
Helpfully, the AI observed that I was “trying to wrangle the chaos of life into some semblance of order,” which was an excellent observation for an AI. What I like most about Todoist is that it’s so easy to capture things. Every idea that pops into my head and every article I find remotely interesting make their way in there–which is how I end up with seven hundred items. I love it because it makes me less anxious about forgetting something.
But I felt I was forgetting something, even with this flawless capturing system. So what’s going on?
The AI suggested that I might want to prioritise. At first, it made me disproportionately angry. I was annoyed with the AI for not understanding that humans have multiple roles to fill, so we can’t just pick work over family or whatever. And this anger got me thinking that maybe there’s something there. I’m not actually mad with the AI but with the prioritisation itself. I decided to try to consolidate the items into fewer lists and re-organise my Todoist. In the process of shuffling tasks from one list to another, I realised that I find it challenging to prioritise. The difficulty comes from deciding what’s more important. Is it my writing? My reading and research? Craft learning? Or taking care of the young people and the house we live in?
These topics are all equally important to me. But when it comes down to it, I can’t get everything done. As Guy, my partner, likes to say, I can do anything, but I can’t do everything. Which means I have to decide what I’m focusing on now.
Being a multipotentialite, I definitely can’t focus on one thing. That’s not going to happen. However, I accepted that I may need to focus on three things I can get done each day. Focusing on something for a day doesn’t sound too bad. I can always focus on something else tomorrow. With that in mind, I consolidated all my tasks and utilised a stricter “Getting Things Done” system. I created a “next action” label, and I make sure that I have precisely one task labelled “next action” for each project I'm currently working on. At any given time in the day, I can look at this list, find the project I want to work on and know what I need to do next.
Again, I wish I could tell you that this increased my productivity by 63%, but I don’t feel the need to measure these things. I find that it’s easier for me to focus, and I get many more things done. Between the Great Reorganisation of 2024 and this new system, I’m already down to about six hundred tasks. Much better.Wrangling the Chaos of Life
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