Organizing Your Days to Limit Anxiety

“I’m late for a very important date….” Do you find yourself at one with the White Rabbit whom Lewis Carroll created in Alice in Wonderland? That anxiety over appointments missed or apologies called-for due to habitual lack of punctuality. Some sort of agenda, at the very least a whiteboard for appointments or, better, a simple Planner (most busy people use a combination of methods including a number of specific, dedicated lists for each kind of work or play in their lives) would help, but it won’t get to the root cause.

Your problem isn’t procrastinating. It’s trying to juggle too many activities without having decided which are important in your life and which are only urgent because others say they are.

Background: Your first step is to focus on three or four goals that you want to accomplish in the next year. You don’t need to focus on the fundamentals in your life, like caring for your children and even companion animals, perhaps on other values like saving money by cooking from scratch or possibly doing your best to serve your L-rd G-d, or health-care activities that are commonplace for you already. What you want are achievements in instrumental (focused) learning that are just out of reach for you, that require some stretching of your abilities. For many people, these would have to do for the most part either with their career or with education to get a job.

Next, you need to choose for each goal two or three objectives, actions that will lead most of the way to your goals once you have carried out the actions. That will give you a total of no more than a dozen objectives, more than enough to attempt to achieve.

For your six to twelve objectives, your tasks are descriptions of how you plan-to-advance-the-project. They are way-stations to forward you to your goal this very quarter of the year, month, week, or day. There is no set number for these, although you should list them in some separate smart phone program or on some separate page of paper or computer spreadsheet if there are more than twenty tasks for your typical objective. (Otherwise, your work in copying them over from day to day will be discouraging, onerous.)

I find it helpful to list all the things that I would like to get done in a given day. Then, I look at my goals and at my objectives to ensure that my daily to-do list reflects my real intentions in life. If something listed on my calendar for the next day is commensurate with a current objective, it gets a “keeper” place on my daily schedule when I organize my next day on the previous evening. (Everything else, I move forward to a new date in my calendar, OR, more radically, mark with an “X” and forget. [Before I forget it, and after I “X” it, I note in three or four words why it need not be done.]) Every morning, I look at the “keepers” and prioritize my activities for the day. “What is the worst thing that is likely to happen if I don’t do this?” should be your first question in assigning priorities to your day. If Hell wouldn’t have frozen over yesterday by your not having done it by the end of today, consider whether it’s really worth doing today.

Many items can be deferred. Answering the ringing phone, the texts you receive, the other interruptions in your day as you have planned it can and should be deferred until the hour or day that you choose to assign to catch-up chores. If nothing discomfits you when you contemplate the changed schedule, you’ve eliminated considerable hassle from your life.

When you complete a to-do, don’t only check it off. Also put down a note next to it about
(how proud you are of yourself even but certainly) all the details that you learned through having done it. It’s helpful to keep an index page specifying the dates upon which you have special notes to which you can anticipate that you might want to look back upon for information (give a three- to five-word précis, so that you can find the entry easily at a later date. It’s remarkable how we forget what seemed so important yesterday!)

When you are overcome by anxiety, pause and pray or meditate until you regain a sense of yourself being in control. When you have a twinge of anxiety only, you may find as I do that looking over your calendar pages and seeing how much you have gotten done already does the trick in reassuring you of your being an accomplished person.

© Copyright Deborahmichelle Sanders 2018. All rights reserved.