How To Deal With Overwhelm, Part I
It seems like there is always too much to do.
That urgent project at work. Your doctor telling you to take up yoga. The 264 unanswered emails in your inbox. Your family demanding more attention.
The longer this goes on, the more you lose agency. You are not in control of your life anymore — it controls you.
The good news is — there are ways out. The bad news is — there are no quick fixes.
Let's talk details.
I.
When you suffer from overwhelm, you have 3 options:
You can become better at organizing yourself
You can choose to do fewer things
You can learn to delegate tasks to other people
Sounds easy, right? And on paper, it is. Yet, none of these options come easy.
II.
Let's talk about the first option — organizing yourself.
One of the main reasons why you are experiencing stress is that you are trying to remember a lot of things. Your brain is constantly telling you, "You still need to do X. You still need to do Y."
As a result, we feel torn in a million different directions, which leads to inaction, which leads to frustration.
The solution is to "download" your brain into an external system. Once you see all your to-dos neatly organized in front of you, your brain will finally shut up.
There are plenty of methodologies for doing so. "Getting Things Done" by David Allen is probably the most well-known. If you search for "second brain" on YouTube, you will find plenty more.
Yet most people never even attempt this, even though it would give them back their peace. Why?
The problem is that it's so much work. There is a lot of stuff in our brains to download. And it's not just enough to write it all down. You also need to decide what list to move each item to. Is it a to-do? A calendar item? A project you don't want to tackle now, but in the future?
On top of that, you constantly have to update your second brain, or it will stop working. Our first brain is always coming up with new ideas and your second brain must keep up. If it doesn't, your first brain will start reminding you of stuff again. Hello anxiety, my old friend.
III.
So, a second brain is not a quick fix. Hence, why most people never bother with it. They would rather "take action," even if that action is misguided.
Alternatively, they will choose an "easy" productivity method (or a patchwork of productivity hacks) and hope they can somehow sidestep the steep learning curve of a system like GTD.
Of course, that never works. Our lives are highly complex. It follows that an adequate organizational system will also have a certain level of complexity. Otherwise, it won't do our lives justice.
You must frame the whole "getting organized" thing as a skill to learn. Just like you need to practice a language or an instrument for a couple of years before you get the hang of it, you need to practice your second brain skills for a few years.
It won't come easy — the great things in life never do. But it will be worth it. It will give you back your peace of mind. It will also ensure you deploy your resources wisely. You will end up doing the things you chose for yourself, instead of just reacting to life.
Okay, we will continue this in subsequent newsletters. As you can tell, I am more interested in exploring the mental barriers, less so the specific tactics. There are a million resources on the tactics already. That's not why people fail at productivity. They fail because of the emotional price there is to pay (and there is always a price).
Talk to you soon!
Niels