How to keep up with everything, develop and not stick your life

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Spinning like a squirrel in a wheel to get your next promotion, but not feeling happy even on payday? The creator of the UX Clan project, the designer knows how to find time not only for work, but also for family, sports, learning something new, and is ready to reveal his secret.

About three years ago, a lot of things fell on me that needed to be dealt with. At the same time, I wanted to maintain a balance so that the work would not swallow my head. I had to do the main work, prepare the curriculum and conduct classes, go to training, learn English, communicate with friends, have fun and, most importantly, take a break from it. It should also be taken into account that I was freelancing and had to organize my work. And in principle, I managed to develop a simple system.

I do not want to go deep into theory: I am a practitioner, not a theoretician. I'll just share the basic ideas and principles. This is not a dogma, and it may not suit everyone. But who knows, perhaps this article will be useful for you.

Theory

Then I did not yet know about the now fashionable GTD and other methods of personal effectiveness, but I came across information about the spheres of human life. It's great when you do everything, for example, at work, but all these successes do not bring satisfaction and do not make much sense if you do not have any movement in other areas.

Usually people think that everything in life happens by itself, money falls from the sky or a rich uncle gives it, health does not go anywhere, good relationships build on their own, success chooses a random person and falls on him, and so on. This is a child's vision of reality, you need to gradually get rid of it. A little more on this in the article.

According to psychologists, there are eight main areas of human life: family, relationships, health, finances, career, growth and development, spirituality, relaxation. This is not to say that one of the areas is more important than the other. They are all pieces that make up a harmonious and interesting life.

I will explain what each area includes:

1. A family: children, parents, relatives, close friends.
2. Relationship: close person, partner.
3. Health: energy, well-being, healthy lifestyle.
4. Finance: salary, expenses, income and so on.
5. Career: profession, skills, colleagues, place of work and career growth.
6. Growth, development: learning, reading, personal achievement, realization of creative potential.
7. Spirituality: state of mind, emotions, joy of life, relationship with the Universe (God).
8. Recreation: hobby, travel, entertainment.

You need to direct your energy into all these spheres, movement should take place in each of them, otherwise distortions and problems in life begin. This means that in order to maintain a balance, for each area you need to make a list of tasks and goals.

But life is such a thing in which something is constantly happening and this balance is very often disturbed. Moreover, the head is always full of different thoughts, current work tasks and informational waste, and it is simply impossible to remember everything and feel calm. As a result, you begin to understand that almost all problems in life happen because of the inability to manage your mind and your time.

Instruments

It is important to understand that a person at a particular moment can effectively perform only one task and this is the task on which he is focused here and now. Multitasking does not exist, you can only quickly switch between tasks. In addition, the clearer the head, the less it is crammed with tasks and thoughts, the more efficiently it thinks. Just as a computer can freeze if you run a huge number of programs, so a person who took on too much starts to slow down. Hence the conclusion: it is better not to keep lists of tasks, a schedule, a plan for the year in your head - in general, everything that consumes resources and prevents you from concentrating on the current moment.

Thus, we need to organize external storage (outside the head) of task lists by area and keep all the necessary information there. Any simple task manager is suitable for this.

Every time a thought or idea comes to our mind, we add it to the list of tasks in the required area. If necessary, add a reminder. This task will not always need to be completed, because after some time it may lose its relevance, and this is normal. The main thing is that it does not sit in our heads and does not consume resources. It makes sense to have a separate list for ideas, which dumps everything that comes to mind. Later, after analysis, ideas turn into tasks or go to the trash can.

It is important to understand that when we add a task to the list, the brain remembers it and reserves resources for it, and when we mark the task as completed, the brain releases those resources. By taking physical action and noticing completion, we help the brain know that the job is done. Otherwise, the brain may not be aware of the fact that the task is being completed.

The beauty of the list is that you can always look at the list of tasks already completed and wonder how much you actually do in a day, month, or year. And how much can you do in a lifetime ?!

From this point of view, working with mail in Inbox instead of the classic Gmail interface is much more efficient: this way letters turn into tasks.

The reason many people suffer when they fail to complete a task is simple. The brain continues to allocate resources for it, and the more such unsolved problems accumulate in the head, the more the person slows down. Therefore, it is so important not to take on too much and bring everything to the end.

Next, you need to allocate your time between tasks and ensure movement in all areas. For this we need a calendar.

A calendar is created for each area, time is allocated for tasks. In this way, we ensure harmonious movement in every area. It is usually worth starting from the hours that are set aside for work, because this time is often fixed and you cannot influence it.

If you think about it, as a child, everyone had a daily routine in kindergarten, then - a schedule at school and university, thanks to which they managed to do a lot. But when a person grows up, he thinks that everything will turn out by itself, because before that someone made this schedule. In principle, this is how it happens, only this someone takes into account their interests, not yours.

Separately, I would like to note that it is necessary to separate common life tasks from workers and, for example, educational ones, it is not worth keeping them in one list. For work, separate tools are used that are sharpened for specific tasks and help to better track their implementation.

For online training courses, its own environment is developed, which allows you to track progress. Other areas have their own tools, for example, for accounting for finances or for tracking physical activity. The main thing is not to overdo it with them.

The brain understands that the tasks are written down and that a certain time of the day is allocated for them. This gives a sense of control and allows you to direct all resources to solving the problem that you need to think about at the moment. This is the very state of presence here and now that the enlightened masters talk about.

And you also need to organize some kind of external storage of information and knowledge, so that you can always find something that can be useful. Most often, these are technical articles and other junk that should not be kept in mind, but which sometimes needs to be re-read.

This does not apply to fiction, which is recommended to periodically read to develop the imagination and in order not to become a highly productive robot.

How to use

I hope the general logic of the work is clear: tasks are collected in pools tied to certain areas, a calendar is created for each area and a time is allocated at which the conceived will be carried out.

Thus, we calm our brain, which understands that there is a specially allocated time for all tasks, and if a particular hour is not busy with anything, then we can relax and dull.

Even if an unexpected event occurs that disrupts the schedule, after that you can always return to business and a normal daily routine, because you have everything written down. The main thing is not to let your brain steam if something does not go according to plan.

An example of a pool of tasks … I often receive mailings of various training online resources, and I add courses of interest to me in the list "Training, development". As soon as I finish one course, I immediately move on to the next. In this way, continuous learning is ensured.

About goals

Goals set direction, give energy, so it makes sense to consider these tools in the context of moving towards what you intended. Even if a person has one global goal, it consists of smaller ones that can be changed and supplemented. Therefore, it makes sense to customize your routine for different periods of life.

To move in some areas, you need to set goals. In others, it is enough to perform routine tasks to maintain the state. For example, in order to develop and grow, you need to constantly learn something new, and to be healthy, you need to brush your teeth, do simple exercises, eat well and regularly, and so on.

Life hacks

Everything that is written below is taken from my own experience and checked more than once.

1. To feel the change, you need to try using these tools for 3-6 months. This period guarantees the development of a habit.
2. More often than not, there is no need to set hard deadlines. But if a task needs to be completed on time, then it may take more time per day, which will entail a reorganization of the schedule. You may have to temporarily sacrifice some areas.
3. Periodically, you need to review the lists of tasks by area and clean them up: often the lists are no longer relevant. You also need to tweak your calendar when you can't stick to it. If the actual schedule doesn't line up with the plan, the brain starts to worry.
4. By sharing your calendar with family or friends, they can see when you're busy and when you have time to meet. This is what the famous drummer Dom Famularo does.
5. It is better to disperse the mind and body in the morning, and slow them down in the evening: such a regime is much more productive and corresponds to biorhythms. As my practice has shown, it is better to transfer training to the morning, while the head is fresh. For example, it is enough to learn a foreign language every morning for an hour without straining in order to significantly raise the level in a year. I also noticed that if, after training, you give the body a light physical activity, knowledge is acquired better. It is better to devote the evening only to physical exercises and rest, and not to burden the brain.
6. To feel good, it is better to get up early, at 5-6 o'clock. And to get up easily, you need to schedule meditation, study, exercises and the like in the morning. Many people lie in bed for a long time in the morning, and then in a hurry get ready and resort to work in a lousy mood. At the same time, it will take them some time for the brain to fully wake up. Now imagine the mood with which a person comes who, while everyone was asleep, managed to learn, do exercises and have a good breakfast - and all this without haste and with pleasure.
7. At certain times, priorities may change, so you need to periodically review the distribution of time between areas and adjust the schedule.
8. To feel good physically, it is enough to do light exercises or swim every morning, and devote 3-4 evenings a week to something more active: yoga, dancing, TRX and so on. It is also important to eat regularly 3-4 times a day. When I lived in India for five weeks and did yoga 2-3 times a day, six days a week, my body felt great.
9. The books you want to read and the movies you want to watch are best placed on separate lists.
10. Sometimes, procrastinating on the Internet, you can accidentally see an advertisement for a product and realize that you need to buy it urgently, otherwise life will lose its meaning. In such a situation, you need to add the item to the shopping list and wait a week: usually, after a few days, the desire disappears by itself.
11. Many people share work and life: they say, now I will suffer at work, and in the evening I will live … But if you think about it, work is an integral part of life. Life begins when you are born and ends when death comes, no matter what you are doing at the moment.
12. It is important to be flexible. Even if you overslept and do not have time to do your exercises or some task took more time, you can always meet the schedule by reducing the time allotted for the next sphere, or reschedule the task to the next day. You cannot become a hostage to your own routine, in life everything rarely goes exactly according to plan.
13. It takes some effort to reorganize life and manage your time more efficiently, but even more effort needs to be made to make the optimal regime found habitual.
14. By and large, it doesn't matter what you do and what you do. It is more important to focus on the current task at 100%, be present in the present moment, feel and be aware of what you are doing, receive feedback from the world around you and evaluate it adequately. It is possible to achieve such a state, and I occasionally succeed, but for this you need to unload your brain.

Afterword

This article does not provide a ready-made recipe for how to maintain balance, achieve success, and stay happy. This is just one of the tools for organizing time, which helped me to do a lot of things in a certain period of my life. To find out if this works for you or not, you have to try it. Good luck!

Related books:

• "", Barbara Oakley.
• "", David Allen.
• "", Theo Compernolle.
• "", Armen Petrosyan.