Let's prioritize!

Do you have a never-ending list of things that need to get done? Being overwhelmed can leave you feeling out of control, unbalanced, and dissatisfied with your life. In this episode, Dr. Tami provides a few helpful psychology tools to help you cope with your daily lists, minimize stress, and increase your control over the list that never seems to end!  

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Transcript

Dr. Tami: 
Boozhoo. Welcome to Psychologists Say. I'm your host, Dr. Tami. Thanks for joining us. If you're new to the group, thank you for being part of our conversation today. Today we're going to be talking about our to-do lists. These are the things that we can have struggle with on a day-to-day basis of I have an overwhelming responsibility to complete these things in my life. And if you're an overachiever, if you're a listener that tends to gravitate towards this podcast because you're a high achiever, you're a top performer, you're somebody who maybe carries a lot of anxious tendencies to strive to achieve and do well in things. Maybe you're somebody who doesn't know how to really get good control over your thinking and that maybe you overthink, overanalyze, over plan. This definitely is a great episode for you because this will help you identify that. You're of course, not alone in this, but also look at okay, there are areas where I can lighten my load, where I can start to actually reduce some things from this list. And we're going to really talk about learning how to prioritize and I'm going to pull in different things that other psychologists have said about this type of process because it's something that we haven't mastered. Everything that I talk about on here, we don't master it, but we learn to strive for improvement. So how do we improve on making sense of what's important to us on a day-to-day basis when we may have 100 things on our to-do list? I also want to talk about how some people create a physical to-do list; they may keep a tracker, they may use their phones to have a calendar or tasks. In some of our messengers, we have tasks that we try to create and just notebooks. We may write it down wherever we can. Some of us may use stickies. If you're those people who tends to have sticky notes post-its all over your house and your office, that's one way of showing that we're really trying to find some system to help us prioritize and some kind of reminder that helps us dedicate some time to a certain task which is needed. One thing to think about is when we're doing this in what can feel like a chaotic manner, then the whole thing can feel kind of overwhelming in terms of where do I start? Which one of these sticky notes do I address right now? And then sometimes we may be looking at our list of things that we need to do and there are some that may create a lot of uncomfortable feelings. You may start to get a little nervous in your stomach or even just feel some anticipation and dread when you're looking at some of these items. What will happen is, of course, your body. You'll want to really avoid those kind of items. It's usually likely that we're going to start off with something that doesn't create so much anxiety. We're going to knock a few things off of our list, kind of trying to avoid the more difficult items that we have to deal with. So in a way, we're really trying to push those down the best we can because we know that those bigger tasks are going to take much more energy, especially if it's something that we don't know, if it's new to us, it's challenging. We know it's going to require a lot more mental effort than some of our routine tasks that we have maybe become very comfortable in doing. And so if you're thinking of yourself right now and how you prioritize things, how do you track your never-ending list? How do you track each day on where do I make changes to this? Or do I feel like this list is not helping me manage my life but it's actually managing me? So just take a moment. Really just take a moment and I just look around. If you're listening in an office or visually, just try to picture how does your system look, what's working for you? Some of us may not do any of the physical, actually the behavior of writing or tracking. I think those who maybe tend to really be overachievers are much better at trying to make these lists and maybe even stick to them. It's really common. And what we see is most people have a running internal dialogue monologue with themselves on what they need to do. They're saying it in their head, ‘oh, I need to do this. Reminder, I need to pick up the kids. Reminder, I need to put gas in my tank today. Reminder, I need to pay that one bill that's overdue.’ These are all things that are popping up in our mind and sometimes they can pop up at really inconvenient times. Like maybe at the end of the day, when you feel like you've just done enough and you're ready to rest and you're trying to maybe sit down and turn on some TV and all of a sudden, in what you feel like is finally a time to regulate and become calm and maybe let go of the day, guess what? What can happen is this emergence of this pop-up, unwanted, uncalled for, but this, oh yeah, guess what you forgot to do today. And that especially if it was something that's paired to a consequence. So this is something I really want you guys to think about. Everything that we're trying to get done, there should be some kind of consequence to not getting it done. You guys think about that for a moment. So if something is important enough to put it on your list, there is some reason why you getting it done is going to result in some kind of outcome. So the anxiety for a lot of people is when they see things undone on their list, there's some kind of consequence that they know they will have to live through and be able to cope with that if it remains undone. And part of that is really this accountability on ourselves where some of us may know we will punish ourselves mentally if we failed at something if we forgot something important, if we didn't meet a deadline, we know that we will tend to be pretty hard on ourselves. Most individuals can suffer with feeling more negative about themselves than positive. That's just what research is showing. It takes a lot of mental work and rebuilding to be able to look at something in a positive light. When you know you didn't achieve something that you set out to do, and then you have to live with the consequence of it, and you have no one to blame for that except for yourself. That's a place that I think many individuals that strive for perfection strive to achieve, that they're trying to avoid, that they do not want to have to deal with themselves if they messed up because they know they can be pretty darn tough on themselves, and that's self-induced. And so that's one area of saying, how do I start to prioritize and take care of me without punishing myself for things that are undone? There's an article that I read by Nicole Byers, and she's a Ph.D. And she talks about three steps to help shrink your to-do list and then to try to get you to achieve goals faster. And I really like what she's had to say. And it's really what I do and work with a lot of my patients. I walk them through this and things that I think can be helpful for you today. So Dr. Byers talks about three steps. First, she says to decide on what's urgent and on your to-do list. Many of us feel like everything is urgent, everything is a priority, everything needs to be done right away. Maybe that's why we think it's on our list. Yet in reality, most of the items do not have that direct, immediate consequence of not getting done within that day. So a lot of our to-do list is made up of things that we have different time spans on getting things done. Everything can be weighed in terms of how much of a consequence or how much of the task needs to be done in order to achieve something or to eliminate experiencing something that unpleasant or unwanted. A good thing to do is look at your list. If it's something that is a mental list, it is a good idea to take time and just jot that down. That will even free up some of your headspace to see that it could be safe, that these tasks, these things that you want to do or need to do, that there's some kind of way to track them. Otherwise, your brain will be spending a lot of energy talking to itself and trying to remind itself and point to different directions of steps that you need to take on this mental list. And the mental list will change all the time based on your stimuli. That means based on something that reminds you or triggers your brain to remember that you have to do this thing. And the brain is not very good at just prioritizing what needs to be done immediately versus what needs to be done by the end of the year, next month, or next week. So that's the kind of work that we need to do as humans. Those of us who have several items on our daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly to-do list, that is one good way to break it down is to start saying what's urgent. This is a group therapy homework planner. They identify a technique that you can use in terms of three drawers and prioritizing your most important, most urgent goal or tasks that need to be done on a day-to-day basis are in the top drawer. And that's basically what Dr. Byer is saying is find that most pressing goal are the things that need to be done within that day. And those are the ones that you prioritize working on and know that I already talked about how when something's challenging or it seems that it's out of our comfort zone, we will try to resist it. And so these are the tasks, even if they have to be done daily if we're uncomfortable with them, we may push them way down on the list. And so I'm going to challenge you to try to tackle those types of activities first that can be very reinforcing and rewarding to your brain and your body to have a sense of accomplishment and excitement about what you're doing and then help you move through the other to do's on your list that day. If you're able to challenge and get through even certain portions of that more challenging task, it will get your brain a little more stimulated. And anytime we avoid something, it's taking up space in our brain because we know we're holding on to it for later. If it's something unpleasant challenging that's going to be taking a lot of our mental effort and energy, it'll still drain us because we're holding onto it and we know that eventually, we have to address it. So that's a really good way for me to try to talk to our listeners today and a good reminder for myself of there are only so many things that are must the things that I really need to get done today. And sometimes what we can do is organize that even into our morning, afternoon, and evening schedules. So when you have a long list for one day, breaking it up into smaller sections can be really helpful. Crossing out anything that you know is not a priority for that day or does not belong in your top drawer of your dresser, those can be moved down. And so this can give somebody a feeling of empowerment and accomplishment without even achieving the thing that's on the list. They simply crossed it out and they moved it to the middle drawer or the bottom drawer. The middle drawer, basically in this exercise is the things that we have to do, but we don't have to do them immediately. There is a consequence to not getting them done. For example, maybe paying a bill on time, but the bill does not have to be done today. There's a deadline, so I can move that one to the middle drawer. I got to focus and prioritize on what I do today. Once you get through your today's list, you'll be amazed that you will be working probably more efficiently and getting more things done by shortening the things that you can delay a bit on. And that is not procrastination. That is really called structured mindful task orientation. You're working on tasks that you know you need to get done within that time frame so that you can only see those tasks and you can start to check them off as you're doing them because you've eliminated those that you can just put off for a little bit. The next one, the second step she talks about is to eliminate your shoulds. Those of you who listen, you're one of my people who strive for perfection. You're an achiever, you're a doer. This is really talking to these types of people. The individuals who have a lot of inner angst and anxiety, who like to be not just do well, but do better, always pushing themselves to achieve a little bit more. These individuals will have extra items on their to-do list that have nothing to do with the reality of what needs to be done. Yet it's an internal expectation that they should be doing this. And so those shoulds take up space on our list. They take up space in our mind, and they really come with a lot of anticipatory angst or a lot of internal pressure, because shoulds can sit in our brain a long time because we know there's maybe no big consequence of not doing it. Except for feeling like you're not living your best life or you're not achieving to the potential or living or setting up yourself the way you'd like to see it. But there's no real consequence coming except for maybe your own disappointment in yourself. To not start a garden. That's maybe one of the shoulds. That's one of the shoulds I love to play around with. I would love to start a garden. I should do that. Yet it is not a priority for me. I have no idea how to get that started. Putting it on my daily list is just taking up mental space and energy. That is one of the things I can move to a lower drawer, the bottom drawer in the homework example, those are the things that really have no consequence. And really, for me, there is no real, real consequence to me not doing a garden. So I could even put that to my bottom drawer and that would be something that maybe I don't ever have to do. And I can say, yeah, I put that in the bottom drawer because I'm not going to feel guilty about that. That's something I'd like. That's a goal, that's an aspiration. I'm not willing to put it on one of my major to-do lists. And so we're really eliminating the shoulds. And if you've been a listener to the podcast, this is one of the common thought distortions of cognitive behavioral therapy. We tell ourselves these shoulds. We use that word? And they often say within CBT is don't should on yourself. It just creates a lot of expectation anxiety and a lot of that is from our own expectations of doing more and doing better. And sometimes that can be definitely linked to being pushed when we were younger, being noted and admired, or reinforced for when we did well. And it's one of the things that we want perfectionists or achievers. They consistently strive for that type of reinforcement. So on a deeper level, it's really learning how to start self-reinforcing for taking things off of to-do lists and making that part of where you reinforce yourself that it's a step in the right direction, that that's an achievement for you is to take things off of your to-do list that are related to shoulds. The last step she identifies is to identify, look at your tasks. Many of them, if you have a long task list, many of these can relate to a goal that's down the road. Some of the tasks can really take you off in a whole different direction. Some of them that you might be working on, there may be wants, not needs. They're not top priority of the first or the second drawer, but yet they're taking a lot of your time, motivation, and energy because there's something that you just desire to do, yet you don't realize you're shifting a lot of your time and attention to something that doesn't really have a direct consequence on you. And then you're losing your time to dedicate towards those top drawer priorities that if you do not do a full day of work, that you will not have enough money to pay your rent, to travel. All of these day-to-day things that we need to eat all of our survival to-dos. Those are the things that we can start to rob our time of being really effective and getting done what we need to for our survival, for our wellness, and then steering clear of spending time on tasks that just are maybe irrelevant. And so if we put more time into tasks that push the needle, as she puts it, pushes your needle towards a bigger goal. This is Dr. Byers that you'll end up having more steps that are getting you to reach this goal versus spending time on things that are maybe taking you off a totally different tangent and draining your energy. And so I think that's one of the ways to really sit and look at how do you track in today's world. I don't know if I know anybody who doesn't have some kind of to-do list, some kind of checkoff system. And like I said, whether you're creating one or not, I do think it will help you save time to sit and create one, but also it will have to be unique to you. Look at what hasn't worked for you in the past and it might be time to try something new. Look at where your strengths are as a person who can track and follow something and kind of keep up on it day to day. And where are you weak, where are you inconsistent? And it's okay for you to pick whatever kind of tracking that you need to pick for your day. Do not try to make your personality fit into what works for somebody else, because then again, that's a should, I should be able to keep this list. I should be able to do this and instead, really get to know you and think about a project or a day. Even when you felt like you really accomplished what you needed to do, you were consistent, you were steady, you were focused, really channel that day and think, what did I do that day to keep myself moving and progressing? Another thing I think I'm going to leave you with is to really break down your to-do list and make sure it's well-rounded. Think of it as a circular versus linear and think of all the other areas in life outside of work or school or community. Think about spirituality, friendships, relationships. Think about fitness and your body wellness. Then your to-do list, make sure that you have categories throughout your day that fit into all of these other areas of what can keep you well and healthy as a person. So, thanks for checking in, Megwich. I enjoyed having this conversation. P.S.: We have a lot of things to do in the day, but the most important thing is to take care of you. So just start by doing that. Miigwetch.