My Brain has too many Tabs open
This morning during my run I came across a kid whose T-shirt read “My brain has too many tabs open”. It left me slightly amused because I recently had to contend with this exact statement — albeit articulated differently.
It has been a little over two months since I quit my job. I had planned out the items and projects I wanted to work on. In fact, I planned out how each day would pan out.
About a week back, my increasing sense of dissatisfaction reached a peak and I had to deal with that. Despite saving about 11 hours a day on an average (because I don’t spend those hours on office work anymore), my progress on my desired projects has been far lower than my expectations. I needed to address this situation to regain a sense of comfort and progress. So, I listed down all the items that I was spending time on. Mercifully, all the items that ended up on that list turned out to be things I care for. The problem is that the list had ten items — a few too many. As much as I like and care for all those items, it was clear that I should not take a kid-in-a-candy-store approach to this once in a lifetime phase of my life. I started rationalising the list. I classified them into operational items and projects. Operational items will remain — they are essentially habits that are going to keep me honest on the “growth” mindset — e.g., running regimen and reading.
Projects had to be prioritised — so I did that. I put lower priority projects on ice and decided to focus on the top two items only. I realised that this is not as easy as it sounds — focus keeps getting dispersed and it requires serious effort to keep it in check. It is very tempting to also make progress on non-prioritized projects. It is hard to be patient.
Back to the topic of this blog. There is never enough time to pursue all that we like. To make meaningful progress, it is critical to prioritise our efforts — taking a cold, hard view and cutting out items that may hold a fond place in our hearts and/or minds but may not be among the most important ones in your list at that time.
Also, this is not the first time I faced this. This is a recurring theme — at work, one too many items on my plate all the time often rendered me tired and spiritless at the end of each day — progress, in general, was limited; Constant context switching and not giving deep thought to most items, made efforts not just frustrating but insipid. Eventually I had to give up on to-do lists because they kept expanding endlessly making them useless. One big issue that I found with to-do lists is that sooner or later, relatively small, trivial tasks tend to make their way into them and once that happens, the list keeps getting longer and longer.
Fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) is another big disabler in keeping our focus straight and narrow. World is dynamic and life is always happening — this means there will always be things that keep tempting you and fight for your attention. Social/professional media amplify the attract-ability or perceived significance of these things. Social media or otherwise, without a razor-sharp focus on what really matters to us, we start to indulge in non-aligning items that come our way. This clarity on what exactly we want to achieve keeps getting muddled and hence it requires constant focus and maintenance.
In essence, as much as it is hard work just to accomplish our important priorities in life, it is hard work even to keep focus on them.
“It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. … The life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.” — Seneca
All of this belies another important point though: if all of our time is spent on planned activities and projects, where are we allowing serendipity a chance? How does creativity emerge? A topic for another day!
