Today, I noticed that I did not focus as much as I planned. I masked my process of busyness by doing something else that was important, but not urgent. I have a deadline to finish. However, I did not focus as much on the latter, and still, I felt productive somehow. Though the work and planning I got done at that time served me to clarify some ideas, the original plan for the day got off the rails. It is not necessarily bad at this stage in life. However, this lack of focus on the main task can hinder my future endeavors.
Prioritize and execute: something I read and it is applicable to me now. I am writing this as a reminder of keeping what is both essential and urgent. There are techniques and approaches to make the best decision when a situation like this happens: a sensation that everything is important, and that everything is urgent.
This can be overwhelming.
To me, when I reach the stage mentioned above, my anxiety builds up in my mind to a degree that I can feel it on my body. Usually, what I do is anything that makes me feel productive, while procrastinating on the fundamentals, or in this case, the deadlines. I did work on something important today, which was an action plan to see what could be the best approach to prepare myself at the moment of applying to graduate school.
Since the application period will start on September, I am asking questions to the coordinators of the different programs. This has given me more insight and has helped me narrow my options. I felt compelled to workout a plan on paper while working on a class assignment. The anxiety started building up in my head, and one idea brought another, and another. This resulted in a storm of possibilities, which in turn made me distracted and unable to focus with the task at hand.
After a couple of hours urgently working on my assignment, I could not help myself and decided to stop doing the essential task. I grabbed pen and paper and started working on something important, but not urgent. I wrote some scenarios, time frames and did some research on schools and programs. It helped to reduce the grip that the anxiety of the future had on me. In a way, this was therapeutic.
In sum, I rediscovered once again a technique that helps me calm down and helps me find my center: writing about what is making me anxious.
In this case, however, I feel that I over did it. It was good at the end though, to work out these thoughts on paper, it seemed necessary. Now I feel more at peace with my plans and with my thoughts. The idea here is to be mindful of how much productive distraction is enough for a given day. Setting a particular hour or time during the day to work out all the thoughts that are in my head might help me to decompress, and work on what is essential and urgent for the day.
On prioritizing,
-E.
Phantasiis 