I’m running, running and running. I fall down exhausted. I feel this everyday. Not just at the end of the day but even at the start of the day. I wake up exhausted even after a good nigh’t sleep. This ‘constant running’ state has became something I live with on a daily basis. My mental chatter ran like this – ‘There’s so much to do, so much to do, and so little time. Come on, hurry up’. Over the last few months, I’ve been actively trying to find a solution for this. To not feel as if a rabid dog is behind me and all I’m doing the entire day is to run to escape it. As some readers of the blog might surmise that it is time for me to visit a mental health professional, but, I wanted to see if there’s anything I could do to reduce these feelings.
Everyday Carry & Workflow
A couple of years back, I wrote a post on ‘what’s in my bag?’. This was a weird post to a few. But, folks who surf the net, know this to be a trend, with a peek at the Flickr stream of pictures tagged with ‘what’s in my bag?’ revealing interesting point of views. It’s just interesting to observe how people use various tools to navigate their day. What they use to get their work done. The posts reveal how we think, what we value, the workflows we follow, how we interact and make sense of the world. In this post I reason out why I use what I use on a daily basis.
Notes on the Fly
I’ve noticed, there are two kinds of people – those who take notes and those who don’t. I love taking notes. I love capturing every thought that flutters up in my brain. But, it is tough to find good notebooks that specifically suit your needs. What were my needs, you ask? That it had to be with me all the time, easy to jot down, easy to refer & easy to store. Once the needs were nailed down, it was the quality of the tools that needed to be looked into: Do you want something to get the work done with, something cheap, something that can withstand any abuse or do you want your tool to mean something, stand for something, made of premium material, bring you joy while using it? Over time, my needs have varied from one end of the spectrum to another. Over the last few months, I have deliberately tried moving away from using digital tools. Not just for the heck of it, but to simplify and have more clarity. I would put information into various apps and never bother to look back at them again. And, then forget where was what. Not to mention that you have to remember what you want to search for, or else, it is not easy to find them. I just wanted one solution that I could write-in, and easily refer back. This lead me not to another app, but to notebooks.
Rough Book
Just before the start of a new school year, my father used to pull out all the class work and home work notebooks I used in the previous year and tear out all the left over pages from them. He would then cut all the pages to the same measurement and take them down to a binder to get it sewn and bound. This book would have on an average 300 pages, some of which were single rule, some broad rule, some double rule and some plain. This book then would be my ‘rough book’ for the new school year. A book in which I could do all math calculations, doodle, or write notes (when I forgot the main notebooks). It used to be the book I could fall back on.
But, of course this was in school.
Task Management Relooked
I read the GTD book almost 11 years back and been implementing it for more than 5 years now. This has been the only time management system that made practical sense to me. But, to be honest, though I organized all the information into projects & contexts, I rarely checked off work as I was supposed to. Most of the time I worked only on urgent stuff making all the organisation (projects, contexts, & perspectives) pointless.