You must have tried repeatedly to organize your times and tasks so that you achieve greater effectiveness in study and work. There is no doubt that these attempts went through the daily scheduling or "To Do List", but we quickly deviate from the schedule that we set for ourselves, so is it our fault or it is a socio-economic structure Fully taking advantage of the status quo for their own interests, and how do we break this cycle of procrastination?
One of the widespread complaints in the twenty-first century is that life was not as crowded as it is today, but some might be occupied with this idea more than others.
According to Liana Sayre, director of the Time Use Lab at the University of Maryland, many Americans - employees, married couples, parents, or college students alike - feel they are missing out on time, or that there is less time these days than it used to be. Several decades ago, the working mother and the shift workers feel especially overwhelmed.
All in all, feelings of preoccupation do not seem to have increased nationwide, so it is difficult to say that these feelings are present for everyone.
But there are two developments that make the time of a significant group of Americans more crowded, says Sayer, and they are that a larger share of people assume mixed "social roles", such as work, emotional partnership and parenthood, and that expectations in each of these areas have increased. .
As she says, the heightened preoccupation is due to "the feeling that there are more things to do, and the feeling that you should" do your best "in all of these roles or you fail as a person.
The simple but crowded place in which these various obligations overlap is the "To-do List".
Americans have always felt they have a lot of tasks to do, but in the past few decades, this feeling seems to have become more widespread and acute, with the emergence of new strains of tasks and the depletion of people's limited mental energies due to the changes in the modern economy.
For many people, these to-do lists, whether written or mental, suffer from a kind of endless slippage, so getting to the bottom of them seems almost unimaginable.
Perhaps the reason many to-do lists are long is because there are simply more things to do.
In his 2015 book, Shadow Work: The Unseen and Unpaid Jobs That Fill Your Day, writer Craig Lambart cataloged a myriad of tasks pervasive today due to technological advances in the last 30 or 40 years: Pay attention to your email inbox, Your passwords, book your place of travel, search for symptoms of health conditions online, scan prices electronically for shopping needs, search for customer service outlets online, answer quality customer surveys, check your bag at airport kiosks, and so on.
While we are carrying out these tasks, time is moving forward quickly with us, says Lampart: "They bite into a minute of your time here, five minutes of your free time there, and then you lose an entire hour of your day."
Many of these "intrusions into unorganized time" are not coincidental, as businesses and organizations benefit from "inserting themselves in your spare time" rather than hiring more labor to do them.
Over the past years, this drive to save work has contributed to tons of shade jobs, such as filling gas on your own or waiting for a customer service agent.
And while technology has made life more comfortable, it can also eat up our time in hard-to-distinguish ways.
Lambart told me that he recently tried to get a radioactive collar for his dog so that he could easily locate it after sunset.
The first collar was not fastened around her neck, and the second, and it fitted her, required two phone calls to customer service, the first to find out how to install it, and the second to request a replacement as the collar was not charging electricity properly.
The whole tragedy was a case study or model in shadow work.
Yes, the collar allowed him to have fun with his dog wherever he wanted and whenever he wanted, but saving him took a lot of time.
Before the era of online shopping and inexpensive light collar technology, Lambart said he would have comfortably taken his dog to a place where there was better night lighting.
The stress that shadow work creates, as well as the stress of paid work, comes from the fact that the Internet allows you to do it anytime you want.
Lampart thinks we achieve "actual wasted time" less easily in this case: "Even if you're not doing a task online, it's grabbing your attention just because doing it anytime is possible."
There was a sense of relaxation when the shops were closed at night.
"To-Do Lists" treat shadow work only in terms of quantity and size.
But it is also important to take into account the mental energy that this work requires of people.
This is the same idea that writer Helen Peterson raised in her writings on mental combustion, which is the thinnest and rampant chalk that spreads among millennials, and Peterson attributes a large part of it to the continuous pressure exerted by this generation's desire for exemplary work.
Peterson's investigation of mental burnout was inspired by a pattern she observed in her personal behavior, from her inability to perform backlog tasks, such as scheduling an appointment with a dermatologist and cleaning car upholstery.
In an article I wrote in 2019 for BuzzFeed, she says: "I used to put a certain task on my weekly schedule and then defeat it for the next week, and it would haunt me for months," and called this condition "periodic paralysis."
On a closer look at these elusive tasks, I noticed that most of them appeared to be "medium priority", as well as unhurried "high effort and low moral return" things that should be completed at the end of the day but would not improve their life to a great extent.
Peterson argues that mental burnout, in its simplest form, causes periodic paralysis in that it drains us psychologically, and that stress and excessive work allow less mental energy to deal with anything that is not urgent (or of medium priority).
Additionally, Peterson links burnout to the need for people to always feel that they are working efficiently or to the need to improve their mental state, their bodies, or their social standing in some way.
Monotonous chores that do not fall into either of the two categories naturally decline in priority and turn into stubborn sediments on to-do lists.
These explanations may help clear the blurring of what might seem to the average bystander ineffective behavior. When people avoid monotonous tasks, Peterson senses an attempt to "get off the track of the to-do list."
Peterson writes about millennials, but people of all ages experience a decline in the mental energy required to to-do lists because of what the economy demands of them.
This is not just related to the number of hours worked, although these hours have increased over the past decades for Americans with college degrees.
Cal Newport, a professor at Georgetown University, discusses productivity from time to time on his radio program, and in terms of knowledge jobs, he says, "The volume of the various things you encounter during the workday has increased dramatically."
He believes that fatigue makes it difficult to work on to-do lists after the end of working hours, and certainly the stress of working shifts and sudden shifts carries its own psychological toll on workers in low-wage jobs.
By the time Americans finish their work and turn to to-do lists, they seem to have less mental energy to finish the regular chores, whether they're millennials or not.
This destructive combination, where there are so many things to do and so little energy to do, does not seem like an easy thing to get rid of, especially for a defenseless person.
Peterson finds comfort in talking about her unhappiness at least, but ultimately calls for "regime change" in American family and work life.
The ultimate treatments for shadow work and mental combustion should be structural, but given that many of their consequences are currently inevitable, we might have had some things people could do to make pregnancy lighter.
These things aren't about promoting productivity for the sake of productivity itself, but about helping people navigate task lists with less anxiety.
First of all, these problems are not the fault of the to-do lists themselves, and Newport views these lists as "neutral technology", as it is a container for storing obligations, and says: "To keep all the things that you have to do in a place that is not your brain" requires less mental energy And it causes less stress.
But for people who feel they have a lot of tasks to complete, Newport says, "Building a to-do list and trying to finish it is almost certainly not about the difficulty of what you're trying to do," and he recommends a better, easier approach.
The process begins with defining the “big issues,” the task “which is so big that you won't say“ I have nothing to do, ”or“ I have hours of rest, ”or“ Let's go to the coast. ”Since people are usually reluctant to finish. The Big Issues "Immediately and without planning, it would be useful to define them in advance at some point during the next week. Then turn to the smaller tasks, and advise Newport to daily scan your list and take care of some of the less urgent routine tasks. This system can be effective due to two considerations. First. According to Newport, "The previous scheduling of major tasks ensures that you will finish them when the time comes to do them." The second is that the daily survey stimulates steady progress, "you break the cycle, you are doing something productive every day and this adds to the momentum."
Needless to say, fixing to-do lists doesn't solve all of your shadow work and burnout problems.
Also, this type of prior planning is very difficult for those who do not have enough time or money due to work or parenthood or both.
But apart from changes in American politics and culture, it appears to be one of the few strategies available for ending cluttered to-do lists.
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This article is translated from The Atlantic and does not necessarily represent the Medan website.