Tired, overwhelmed, exhausted?
Is it time to try something radically different?
So week 1 of our November reset—how are you doing?
How is your nesting, nurturing, and no-ing going so far?
Here are some prompts to ponder this week:
Despite feeling tired, overwhelmed, and exhausted, why, when, and how do you push on through?
What makes you push on?
What would happen if you just stopped?
What would happen if you dropped a couple of projects?
What role does busyness play in your life?
Do you use busyness to numb your feelings?
What feelings are you trying to numb?
Do you resist being in the present moment? If so, why?
When I did this exercise, I realised that I was busy, not because I was trying to numb my feelings but because I just wanted to cram as much as I can into life - I love learning new things, I love creativity and stimulation.
I’m not trying to avoid feelings, I’m trying to turn up the volume on feeling good.
The problem is that I try and cram so much in that I become overstimulated and then overwhelmed.
Then I stop enjoying the very things I am cramming my life with.
And I just want to go to bed.
Focus on doing a few things that count.
Last year, I had the privilege of interviewing Oliver Burkeman, author of 4000 weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Bodley Head (£16.99)
His advice was to focus on doing a few things that count.
But how do you decide what few things count? I asked
“To be alive on the planet today is to be haunted by the feeling of ‘too much to do’, whether or not you lead a busy life in any conventional sense.
It’s ‘existential overwhelm'—the modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you’d ideally like to do and what you can actually do.”
So, a bucket list is not a good idea? “Stuffing your life full of pleasurable activities so often proves less satisfying than you’d expect. It’s an attempt to devour the experiences the world has to offer, to feel like you’ve truly lived – but the world has an effectively infinite number of experiences to offer, so getting a handful of them under your belt brings you no closer to a sense of having feasted on life’s possibilities,” he says.
To be alive on the planet today is to be haunted by the feeling of ‘too much to do’.
“The more wonderful experiences you succeed in having, the more additional wonderful feelings you start to feel you could have or ought to have on top of all of those you’ve already had – with the result that the feeling of existential overwhelm gets worse.
The internet makes this all much more agonising because it promises to help you make better use of your time while simultaneously exposing you to vastly more potential uses of your time – so the very tool you’re using to get the most of life makes you feel as though you’re missing out on even more of it.”
So how do we get more out of life?
“In reality your time is finite and doing anything requires sacrifice – the sacrifice of all the other things you could have been doing with that stretch of time.
If you never stop to ask yourself if the sacrifice is worth it, your days will automatically begin to fill not just with more things but more trivial or tedious things, because they’ve never had to clear the hurdle of being judged more important than something else,” says Oliver.
So, what’s the answer?
“Resist the urge to consume more and more experiences.
Instead try to get your head around the fact that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, and instead focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you do actually have time for – and then you become freer to choose in each moment on what counts the most. And mostly that means not fitting more in but giving things up. It’s been called JOMO.”
JOMO?
“The Joy of Missing Out. It’s the positive commitment to spend a given portion of time doing this instead of that because this is what counts the most right now.”
But there is so much that tries to grab our attention right now?
“That’s why it’s so important to become more conscious about what you choose to put your attention on because your attention IS your life. Your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.
So, when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life. The finest meal at a Michelin starred restaurant might as well be a plate of instant noodles if your mind is elsewhere; and a friendship to which you never actually give a moment’s thought is a friendship in name only.
Attention is the beginning of devotion’ writes Mary Oliver.
So true.”
What can you joyously miss out on this week?
What can you devote your time to instead?
Enjoy!
4000 weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Bodley Head (£16.99) by Oliver Burkeman is out now.