It’s easy for me to keep adding more and more to my schedule. I usually think a class is too good to pass up or sure, I’ll help in the classroom for an hour. Sometimes I forget that I have time or energy limitations.
“When you add something new to your life, do you subtract something else? Or do you keeping adding and adding and adding until you feel constantly overwhelmed?”
Uh… guilty as charged! One of the Weekly Well Mindfulist features in August was written by writer and mindfulness-based stress reduction teacher Sandra Pawula, about how it so happens that new activities sneak into your day. You might think this opportunity is just too good to pass up or you tell yourself it won’t take much time.
Her article, Embrace Simplicity and Ease Through the Art of Subtraction, spoke to me, especially since I read it right after I wrote last week about our addiction to busyness.
“But instead of subtracting another activity in order to stay in balance,” Sandra says, “you just pile on new ones, which naturally leads to tension, overload, and overwhelm.”
It’s probably natural for a curious and enthusiastic person like me to want to do so much. There are so so many classes and books and experiences to learn from! Yet rushing from one thing to another and feeling like I can’t catch my breath… it’s not so much how I want my days to be. I have felt like I’m running too fast and don’t even have time to read my email. I’m doing two things at once constantly and I don’t like it.
I subtracted 1 big thing… teaching religious school. But I added 4 other things. The equation doesn’t exactly balance. Thinking about it for a few days, I do not think I’m keeping busy to avoid myself or something else. I agreed to serve on some school and community organization boards because I genuinely care about their purpose and I very much want to be part of my community. I want to meet people too. I hope that as long as I try to keep my goals in mind when deciding what to attend and how to contribute, I will keep my head and stay sane.
Leo Babauta writes in this Zen Habits post that “having ‘not enough time’ is just a feeling — we all have the same amount of time, but we often fill up the container of our days with too much stuff. The problem is having too much stuff to fit into a small container (24 hours). If we look at task management and time management as simply a container organization problem, it becomes simpler. How do we fit all of the stuff we have to do into our small container? By simplifying. And letting go.” I like that he says we should focus on the task that will have the most impact and do that. Also limiting ourselves to three main tasks per day… I have been doing that for a week now and it’s been successful.
Aha moment here: “Your frustration comes from an ideal that you should be able to do it all, that you should be able to do everything on your list.” Let this moment be ideal and let the rest go. Love that!
Leo also had an excellent post yesterday (honestly, they ALL are) called “How Not to Do It All.” In it, he writes:
“Be ruthless. You need to filter out the things trying to overwhelm your life. More things try to get into your attention bandwidth than you can possibly handle. So filter them out: say no to most requests, don’t make it your job to respond to everything, don’t just read everything possible, don’t have the firehose of social media always on, turn off your phone for awhile. Each day, take a step back and think about what you want to fit in it.”
It is so hard to say no! Do any of you struggle with this?
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