A few weeks ago, in a different life, I had a system of daily, weekly, and monthly tasks that kept me pretty well in line. I knew what things I did on Tuesday, and what things I did on the last Tuesday of the month - and even if there was a little bit of a shift (I was sick or I had an appointment or whatever), I knew what I had planned to do, so I could make it up.
Now I'm in a whole new world where a lot of the assumptions I made about where I'd go, what I'd do, what resources I'd have access to are no longer valid. Do Tuesdays still exist anymore? Hard to say!! And yet, there are still things that need doing, and I apparently need to do them, so I've been experimenting with a few new frameworks for thinking about tasks. I'll put them here in case some appeal to you - with my normal pandemic reminder that now is a time for flexibility and experimentation! The conditions for many of us keep shifting, so therefore, we will probably need to shift how we think about our time and our work.
Three things - This is a model that I've seen recently on Instagram, as popularized by Elise Cripe. You purposefully pick smaller things when you're feeling overwhelmed with a big thing, and you let yourself focus on just those. You know that there are other things to be done, but you do the little things and you re-establish your identity as a person who does some things sometimes!
Top Three - Another variation, used in a lot of planners. You put the three most important things in your top spot, above all the noise of the rest of the list. It's a way of visually pulling out the highest priority items so that you can focus on just the smaller section first, and then move on if you have more time.
Day block goals - My days have been separating into three categories lately - before lunch, after lunch, and after dinner (MEALS ARE LIFE) - and it has been helpful to pick a goal for each block. The trick to this one is that I can only have work items in two of the three blocks - one has to be a rest/self care/fun/family thing. It doesn't necessarily have to be the last block of the day, but it does have to be there.
Start here - My brain has also been VERY FOGGY in the morning and after breaks, so before I switch tasks or shut down for the day, I pick somewhere to start. It isn't usually the most important, or the hardest thing, but it really helps ease me back into my work when I really really don't want to. Past me picked where to start! Thanks past me!
Next thing - Sometimes, when I'm at my most overwhelmed, I drop into what I call "next thing" thinking. For example, I might get up and see that the kitchen is a disaster. Instead of letting myself make a list of everything in the whole house that needs to be cleaned, getting totally overwhelmed, and then not doing anything, I just pick the next thing. I wash this mug. And then, I wash the next mug. Then maybe I wipe down a counter. But I only focus on the next, most readily apparent thing. This is particularly helpful when my anxiety is really high - just focus on one thing, and then the next thing, until I can feel a little more grounded.
Be gentle with yourself - what worked before might not work now. But just because *that* way of working isn't as effective right now doesn't mean that NOTHING will work - it just means you have to embark on an experiment to see what can be useful in these conditions.