In keeping up with a bullet journal, I’ve found myself using the empty space to fill up my day with all the things I plan to accomplish. Of course, a majority of this is wishful thinking, and making this lengthy to-do list tends to only cause guilt when I’m looking to relax. Luckily, the system I’m using has an easy way to accomplish what I need while removing the weight of my expanding laundry list, the daily priority.
Prioritizing
As I’ve written before, priority effectively means the first thing. There’s a bit of a paradox when we refer to our “priorities.” While there may certainly be a number of things that are important, there is always something at the top.
Often, I think it’s somewhat easy to figure out what I really need to get done on a given day. It might be a small task or a piece of a larger project, but the problems I’m having with workload management seem to stem from what comes after. I underestimate the effort needed for what I plan to get done and overestimate how I’ll feel going into those tasks. There are some days when just the time spent at my day job makes it hard to get anything else done. I’ve fallen into this trap time and time again, yet I keep thinking, “today will be different.”
I’ve found myself in this pattern where my solution to get something done seems to be to throw as many things as I can on a list, and see what I end up finishing, rarely differentiating, with any degree, how critical a task is. My hope is, by emphasizing a single task, I will finish what I need while also giving me an opportunity to properly relax afterward, guilt-free.
In Order to Relax
Admittedly, I’ve been pretty burnt out the last few weeks. Even what was supposed to be a non-productive trial of social media still took effort. I had to make the time in the day and think about what to write that week.
For some reason, it seems like my solution for this burnout is to throw more things on my plate. I don’t know what I’ve been thinking in this regard, but doing this has made it hard to make time to properly relax. Whenever I do find myself kicking back and trying to turn off my brain for a bit, I have a creeping sense of guilt that I need to work on what I set out that day.
Creating a long list makes starting only more difficult, as now I’ve set out to do all of these things. By limiting what I have to do to a clear and simple task, I hope that I can get through the barriers to get started and get finished what I set out for the day. If I come up with other things I want to do afterwards, that’s fine, but I am then free to do whatever else, I hope, guilt free.
I find it somewhat dumb that I need to make a system for myself to relax, but I suppose I’m just wired that way.
Trying Out Before Buying In 