Anxiety and the myth of "time management." How do these correlate with one another?
Some Back Story
I recently had a friend ask me about how time management and anxiety worked together.
This is something I really have not mastered and work to figure our everyday. I am not a massive anxiety sufferer but I do know people who are. When I was first starting out I didn't have a care in the world and let everything freeform in life and winged it. This suited me for that period of time in my late teens and early twenties; however, now in my early forties that is a different story.
As I have gotten older and wiser I have discovered that my time and anxiety can and walk hand in hand quite frequently. I find that if I don't schedule my time proficiently it causes anxiety and if I over-schedule it, it causes anxiety as well.
So What is the Answer?
If over-scheduling and under-scheduling both cause anxiety what is the solution then?
The answer is balance. How do you balance this and make it work for you? What are some of the signs to watch out for and how do you overcome some of the pitfalls?
These are all really good questions and I don't have a single good answer for you that will work for you.
I know what you are thinking now is why am I here then? The answer is to get a solution. The solution that works for me on this may not work for you. All I can do is give you what has been working relatively well for myself and hopefully, it inspires you to find something that better works for yourself.
The best remedy to this for myself and I am going to talk in the way I have made progress on keeping my anxiety and time tracked as far as how I go
about scheduling tasks into my day. My way works pretty well for me and I don't know how it will work for you. My method is a work in progress as refine and tweak it to how I need to be.
So I have very mild anxiety which can be kept under control for the most part with some quite simple things. The one simple thing I use which I have talked about before is bullet journaling. I am creative at heart and like I said have always been more freeform with how I run through my life.
This one concept has helped me keep track of what I spend in a day when auto payments are coming out, and keeping more on track for my production schedule for the blog and videos. I started a few times to try and get my life scheduled and tried several different ways with limited to no success. From day planners to notifications on my phone, and combinations of both. Nothing ever seemed to work which caused some anxiety as well.
The idea of the bullet journal that I really happen to like is how I can manipulate it to how I need it to work and gives me the freedom to change and schedule as I need to a lot more. I don't have any set times per se in my journal unless there is something very specific that needs to be done at a certain time. Everything else is free to be done when I get time in the day to do the thing.
What makes me happy with this solution is it gives me the structure to add items to get done in my day; however, it doesn't constrict me to any specific structure and times. I can add and take away items and ideas as needed. I have just enough structure for myself to keep anxiety at bay for not scheduling, and enough freedom to keep time free-flowing and not over structuring my life and keeping the anxiety of lack of downtime away.
If I am not able to get to something not a big deal I can move it to the next day, and work on it then, or if I am not able to handle my day I can set everything aside and not feel bad about it. I've come to use this when I'm at the office and not just for my personal life and making sure fewer things slip through the cracks of the day and week.
One key I came to learn as well, and I cannot for the life of me remember where I learned it; however, it has come to help me make peace with time and how we do NOT control time. We cannot reorder time to have 2 pm come before 1030am to make life more convenient. What we can do though is task management and order where those fall into our days and how and when we are going to care of said tasks. This one simple idea of task management instead of time management will set you free!
How do you control your anxiety when it comes to task management? Comment below.
Thank you for reading I hope you enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed creating it for you. Give the article a LIKE, a SHARE, and a COMMENT.
Ride Hard and Live Long.
Sincerely,
Rob Hicks
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