If You Feel Constantly Busy, Cleanse Your Cognitive Potential
You constantly go from morning to night, but it seems that there are not enough hours in the day. This feeling can come from the seemingly endless to-do list. To combat this, focus on increasing your “cognitive potential” rather than doing more.
As productivity writer Tony Crabbe points out to the BBC, much of our work in today’s world revolves around knowledge, not manual labor. If you’ve worked on a farm, you only need to care for that many hours of daylight and a lot of land. You know exactly when you’re done. However, your mailbox is always replenished by itself and does not know any downtime. This can lead to a feeling of futility in trying to “finish” your job. The behaviorist Eldar Shafir describes this as a cognitive bandwidth problem. In other words, you only have what you can focus on throughout the day:
Feelings of lack of money or time haunts the mind, thus making the decision-making process difficult. When you’re busy, you’re more likely to make the wrong time management choices – making commitments you can’t handle, or prioritizing trivial tasks over important ones. A vicious spiral begins: Feeling busy makes you even more busy than before.
In reality, you can only work no more than usual. You’re just stressed because the list seems endless. To combat this, give yourself hours of the day when you close your email tab, step away from your desk, and unplug. Even if you seem to be wasting productive hours, you may not always be able to finish your job by simply spending more hours on it .
Why Do You Feel Busy All The Time (When You Are Not) | BBC Futura via ManMade DIY