Letting Things Go

Or 'Not Getting Things Done'

March has been a difficult month to sink my teeth into. I’ve felt on the back foot since about mid-February, trying to sort out some large chunks of life admin, whilst also recovering from a nasty bug.

Since this is largely a writing experiment, let me indulge you with some banal details.

*Starts rant*

Whilst getting a tire with a slow puncture repaired, the technician mentioned that my exhaust was sounding strange. So I took it to a reputable exhaust shop to get it fixed, thinking it would be a quick, easy job. That it was not. I was car-less for three days, and about $550 out of pocket.

I then received my car back to find out that the passenger seat had been scuffed. After some brief ‘who dun it’, I took my car back to the exhaust place for them to fix it. There was more driving back and forth, waiting for things to finish, accompanied with some big-ticket item shopping to sort out my home office.

Then came financial year end. My book-keeping has been largely automated, but the taxman requested a lot of documentation which kept me busy for some time. There was also some back and forth with my tax consultant, trying to understand why the tax authority was giving me such a hard time, since there was nothing untoward with my accounts.

I then discovered that an error in my stock-broker’s tax filing from last year still hadn’t been resolved, and have had to contact the parties concerned to finally sort that out.

Amidst this, I haven’t been able to move my projects and tasks along my kanban boards. They’ve been staring at me accusingly from the ‘todo’ column for a few weeks now, as I try to ignore their incessant pull.

*Rant over*

I recognise an exhausting pattern at play in my life—one of never feeling that I’ve done enough in a day. This has only been exacerbated by the amorphous tasks required to address some of the issues detailed above—the things that take as long as they take, that are not a simple checkbox on a tasklist, and that cannot be ignored, lest they cause further problems down the line.

Although I try not to complain about these things, people close to me have noticed my general level of ‘frazzledness’. It seeps into my interactions, taking me out of the ‘now’ as some part of my brain continues spinning trying to solve the various problems.

Is there an end to this madness? Not directly, I don’t think.

For one, life is only going to get more complex and intense, particularly if having a family is in my stars. More responsibility is inevitably going to come down the pipe, and it’s not going to fit into nice little boxes that can be time-blocked away.

And so arises the need for a reframe. Instead of a swirling mess that I need to efficiently hack my way through, I am trying to consider this as an opportunity to learn to ride the crests and troughs with grace; to not stumble over my own feet in the never-ending saga of living.

And whilst it’s more esoteric than I’d like to admit, it’s complemented nicely by the more practical advise from this article by productivity guru (or existentialist?) Oliver Burkeman. He beautifully captures the idea of a universal ‘productivity debt’ that so many people feel:

Few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood than this vague sense that I'm falling behind, and need to claw my way back up to some minimum standard of output. It's as if I need to justify my existence, by staying "on top of things"

In the article, he recommends the simple switch of keeping a ‘done’ list rather than a ‘todo’ list.

A done list, unlike a todo list, is empty at the start of the day and is then filled with the things you accomplish during the day. Instead of starting the day with a backlog of things to tick off in order to feel a basic sense of okay-ness (i.e. barely keeping it together), it takes the perspective that there are more things to do than can ever be done. So rather chalk up the wins, and practice a healthy detachment from the impossible task of getting all the things done.

If you can give up the impossible quest to pay off your productivity debt, and instead start thinking of each day as an opportunity to move a small-but-meaningful set of items over to your done list, you'll find yourself making better choices about what to focus on.

Sounds like a worthwhile bit of mental gymnastics to me.