The LIFE Project

Chapter 4: Making It All Fit In

Whoo a whole week of the LIFE Project and I'm still here! It's been a daunting process, but I feel like I might have figured out an approach that works when it comes to scheduling. It took a bit of trial and error, but I persisted because I know that time management is probably going to be the thing that makes or breaks my progress. 

Why? Well... because I haven't been really good at it lately, and that made me feel like I was constantly overwhelmed. Secondly, time, money, and/or energy are the three things that make all my goals just a bit more possible. I can make more money in theory (one of the many things I'm working on), but energy is a somewhat finite resource, and no matter what we do, there will always only be 24 hours in a day. 

Lately, I've been trying to squash a little bit of everything into my day, but it ended up feeling like I wasn't really making any progress. Thinking about it a bit more, I think there are a few reasons why this was the case. 

First: If you don't give enough time to something, it takes longer to finish. 
Second: If you're constantly hopping between tasks, you actually waste time and energy to get into the right "mode" to do each thing. And then, just when you're in the mental space to get into that thing, you move onto the next and the whole process starts again. 
Third: I bought into this idea of "needing to get to it all" a bit too much. Culturally, we're expected to be productive while being healthy while also juggling family life and any extra pursuits we might have. Thing is, just a bit of basic math says that doing all the things in one day (and doing them properly) is impossible. So I've been dogged by a consistent sense of failure, which is so much fun when you have an anxiety disorder. 

That failure plus anxiety also created a vicious cycle because the anxiety exhausted me even more, which left me with even less energy with which to focus. Which meant that even less got done. 

The impossibility of fitting all the things in is a major reason why I stopped using a schedule in the first place. Taking a to-do list, filling your schedule up with tasks, and having more tasks left over after you didn't give yourself time to breathe is just soul-destroying. I didn't want that either. 

So, for the past week, I've been thinking about how I want to allocate those three resources: time, energy, and money. 

Money is kind of the easiest because it involves setting up a budget (which is mostly automated in my case) and doing a bit of planning around what I need to spend money on to 1) keep my life and the things in it ticking along and 2) make things a bit easier on myself when/how I can.

Time is a bit of a mind-shift. I've always been a bit of an over-performer, which was great until I completely burned myself out and left myself feeling like I have no pleasure left over in my life. I don't want to get back into the mental space that I do things I love because I have to. That just turns having fun into a chore. I've also been listening to a podcast on happiness and it turns out that research is showing us that time starvation is a terrible thing for our mental health. We don't want to be in a situation where we have no time for prolonged periods. Putting ourselves in such a place actually does more harm than good and depletes our energy. More on this later, but it brings me to my next point. 

And then, there's energy. I've mentioned this before, but this is currently the bugbear in my life. Mentally, I can accept the shortage of time because I know that it's impossible to add hours to one's day. But I am struggling to accept the sense of limitation that I've been feeling as a result of my exhaustion. It's a process to work through these feelings. I realize I did some of this to myself by over-working for years on end. Some of the other things were beyond my control. One major cause for this is that my PCOS combined with years of chronic stress wiped out my adrenal function. So I get mentally exhausted due to burn out, and then I also get physically exhausted (even from mental work) due to the impact of stress on my body when I can't produce enough adrenaline to keep functioning.