Category: Productivity

Our ability to manage logistics can often be overlooked when we think of our mental health. But logistics (planning, doing regular, boring life tasks like cleaning, paying the bills, etc) are an important factor for our stress and anxiety levels. For many people, trying to plan or white-knuckle their way out of frustration with managing their day-to-day life doesn't work. 

Maybe this is familiar:

Your kitchen is wildly messy → tired and overwhelmed, you decide not to do it now → you feel a teeeeensy bit better, because you’ve decided not to deal with the thing. → your kitchen is worse now, and because of that, your feeling of overwhelm has also gotten worse. Now, more than ever, you really (really, really) don’t want to clean the kitchen, because it would take a solid 2 hours to clean it properly. At some point, you will likely reach a point where you will end up cleaning things, or someone else you live with may. And t ...

A sense of direction, purpose, and identity. Most would agree that these are factors contributing to a fulfilling life. At some point most of us have also experienced the anxiety or depression that accompanies a loss of these.

As we attend to the daily concerns of life, we experience the satisfaction and positive emotions that come with caring for family, making progress toward work, financial and health goals etc. At the same time, the immediacy of these concerns can sometimes take almost all of our focus, distracting us from parts of ourselves that may have been buried under the daily routine.

To bring balance, it’s important that we check in with ourselves from time to time to ensure that we are moving forward with internal integration, an awareness of who we are and where we want to go. 

A simple exercise for doing this involves making two lists. 

For list one, make a list of the to ...

• Do you feel like you have lots of things you need to do or should be doing, but you just can’t seem to get them done? 
• Do you have trouble being productive and staying motivated to get your tasks completed?  
• Do you find yourself getting distracted and end the day feeling like nothing was accomplished? 
• Try tomatoes!  That’s right try tomatoes.  

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management system that alternates focused working sessions with short breaks. The goals of this technique are to improve your ability to complete tasks by maintaining sustained focus on one task, and to reduce mental fatigue by intentionally resting between tasks. It was developed in the 1980s by Francesco Cirillo.  He was feeling overwhelmed and underproductive. So he decided to commit to 10 minutes of focused time on one task and he found a tomato sh ...