So I've been really busy this week, and this weekend is not much better.
Last night, all that busyness felt completely overwhelming. The stress of it all reached a boiling point. The magnitude of my to-do list felt crushing -- especially since I couldn't even enumerate everything on my to-do list.
That inability to enumerate was an epiphany point for me. I keep to-do lists so that I know what needs to be done, but I no longer knew what was on my to-do list. Meaning that now I had no good idea of what needed to be done.
I've had this happen at work before; the projects stacked up and I lost track of them all. In programming lingo, my to-do list became a stack rather than a priority queue, and I quickly became more frustrated than was warranted, and less productive overall.
The solution there was to "slot" things. For each project that comes in, determine its priority, and assign it to a slot on a specific day (or days, if necessary; one day is preferred, since it keeps me from procrastinating).
For example, my to-do list right now is mostly just a list of homework assignments with their due dates.
It looks like this:
- Finish Chemistry homework assignment (due Tuesday)
- Finish Chemistry lab report (due Tuesday)
- Take Chemistry lab quizzes (due Tuesday)
- Finish Datacomm homework (due Thursday)
- Watch Datacomm video lecture (due Tuesday)
- Study for Chemistry test and Datacomm test (due Tuesday)
That tells me what I have to do, and when it has to be 100% completed. What it doesn't do is prescribe when to actually do each item. This is where slotting comes in. Let's slot these by day:
Tonight (Thursday):
- Watch Datacomm video lecture
- Finish Datacomm homework
Friday
:
- Take Chemistry lab quizzes
- Finish Chemistry lab report
Saturday
:
- Finish Chemistry homework assignment
- Study for Chemistry test and Datacomm test
Sunday
:
- Nothing. (Optionally, study for tests)
Monday
:
- Study for tests.
There, everything's slotted. Now I have a defined agenda for each day, and I'm free to do other things once the day's agenda is satisfied -- resulting in stress-free downtime. No need to worry about any other day's tasks.