you’ll never feel caught up if you don’t let yourself get caught up
I have a confession: My life lives in my notes app.
Every idea I’ve ever had, every party I’ve ever planned and every to-do list. Even though I love project management softwares and rely on my calendar to help me remember the smallest things, my notes app is where I empty my brain so that I know that the ideas floating around exist somewhere outside of my head. Sometimes I start a list of the things that pop into my head and label it “tomorrow list” out of habit. But what happens when the tomorrow list is suddenly 20 items long?
All of a sudden I went from freeing my mind to feeling overwhelmed and like I was now running behind. When I fall into the habit of constantly adding to my list I shift into a place of everything feeling like a priority and most of all never feeling caught up.
For years I was operating from a place of time-deficit. Feeling like I had too much on my to-do list and never the time to get it all done. I was equal parts getting things done and moving the goalpost of what ‘done’ actually looked and felt like. At the same pace I was checking things off my list I was adding even more. When I look back, I never actually let myself feel caught up. Under the disguise of being organized, I was actually keeping myself on the hamster wheel with no end in sight.
I remember talking to my therapist about how my life lives in lists. I have a list for work, a list for the grocery store, a list of people I need to get back to, and well the list went on. She gave me the simplest and most potent advice I’ve ever received: “But what if it didn’t?”
At the time, that threw me into a spiral
How would I remember everything?
What if I forgot something?
How would I keep track of all the different things I’m juggling without dropping the ball?
How would my brain hold it all?
All these questions revealed something deeper once I read between the lines: I didn’t need more lists, I needed to simplify my life. I wasn’t living my life in a way that was mentally or physically sustainable. If I needed four different lists or one list of 20 items to get through the week, this revealed some deeper themes:
I was overcommitting my time
There was no reason that I needed to be juggling as much as I was for a large part of my life. What it came down to was that I was overcommitting my time by not deciding when I really couldn’t take on more. I was always saying yes to others and neglecting to say yes to more time for myself to rest. One of the biggest learnings was recognizing that a list item doesn’t reflect the 10 or 12 hours something might actually take. For accurate time estimates, I like to use a project management software called Hive to help me organize my time. For starters, you can add in parentheses on your to-do list how long something might take to keep that in mind as you’re planning your week. Thinking about the time attached to a list item helps to put into perspective that the 20 items on your list aren’t going to take 1 minute each, those are real tasks with time required to complete them.
I fell into the habit of micromanaging myself
When I felt like my life was just a series of lists not only did I feel disconnected from what I was doing, I was just plain overwhelmed. I felt this shame creep in when I would lay in the sun instead of chipping away at my astronomical list. This habit was residual from my 9-5 life where an “urgent” email had the potential to derail my entire week as I would keep pushing the list of things I wanted to accomplish aside. I believed that in order to be “successful” I needed to always be working on something, like someone was always looking over my shoulder. When I started working for myself, that imaginary person looking over my shoulder was me. Success feels much different for me these days. Success is measured in presence not productivity.
I wasn’t giving myself room to breathe
There’s a weird feeling that happens when I feel like my whole life is dependent on everything going exactly as planned. There’s this underlying anxiety that runs under the surface that puts pressure on myself to not get sick, not take more time to rest than I allotted, and like I needed to always be working on getting through my list or else I was being “lazy.” It turns out I wasn’t being lazy or procrastinating, instead I was slowly learning to listen to my body’s need for rest and need to take breaks.
I’m not telling you to throw your to-do list in the trash, rather if you feel like your list is starting to get overwhelming make the decision to not to add anything else to your list until you decide what your stopping point is. This is your permission slip to let yourself feel caught up. To decide that something actually can wait until next week. And to reframe what we once learned was procrastination as self-care.
Instead of feeling like you’re working for your list, here are three ways to help your list work for you:
Give yourself a cutoff and decide when you’re not adding any more to your list
Most importantly, add self-care to your list that feel fun and easy to check off. Add your self-care to your list, calling a friend, going for a walk, things that will support your wellbeing while giving you the boost of checking something off your list
Give yourself permission to take things off the list that aren’t a priority