How to create headspace
Without enough mental space, you risk falling into mindless routines and losing your focus.
This is a continuation post from my earlier text about efficient time management, but it can be read as a standalone piece as well. While there exist many interesting personal mental methods, I'll focus on more general and widely applicable ones.
Reorganizing Tasks: The Mental Reset
While structured planning is crucially important to being long-term functional, there is a catch in having solid routines: it is easy to end up in a tunnel of mechanical operations without much thought for the why -question. Whenever I feel cluttered, overwhelmed by my tasks lists, I stop as soon as possible and re-organize my task lists. It may be that unexpected amounts of new tasks emerged, or that I had miscalculated the time needed for some of the tasks, or my general stamina shifts into a lower gear cycle. In short, something that means that I can’t do everything I had thought I would be doing.
When facing this wall - whether it is physical or mental doesn’t matter - it is good to sit down and re-organize. The key skill is the ability to let go: you can clean the table by re-arranging tasks and projects within a longer time window, but more often than not, you need to scrap something as well. If your task lists keep growing despite an active and efficient daily mode, it is clear that there is simply too much. Just ruthlessly discard the ones that lose the competition; often they are the ones that have been hanging around for quite some while.
Even if you toss over the board some items, it is generally good to re-organize as well. My favorite method is simple and called “Blank A4”:
I pour everything out of my mind into a single sheet of A4 paper, by pen, and this means everything that has been mulling on my mind. It includes both things that have been already scheduled, things that have emerged and things that might be longer in the horizon, but anything that takes space in my head without paying rent. This is usually a fast thing to do; maybe ten minutes.
I continue with adding things popping to the working memory for the next hour or two. I usually feel immediately purified and lighter after this, which in turn helps me to turn my critical gaze to time-usage. Is my calendar reflecting my goals?
After the sentences dropped to the paper seem like a thorough collection, I continue with re-organizing them: what goes to the actual task lists, what goes to the three months- list, what is unnecessary, which small tasks I can crunch immediately away. Reshuffling your plans and ideas in this way keeps the perspective fresh and more closely attached to your actual goals.
An additional and occasionally used method that is linked to this one - usually following it, if needed - is to go through all my calendars, making sure they are internally synchronized and overall balanced. Sometimes I even proceed to going through my larger goals, and it is not unheard of to reset completely the task Excel. Remember: all of these are tools, and if you feel that you need a reshuffle, a reset or a new perspective by changing tools completely, just do it. Whatever keeps you focused, effective and your eyes on the price.
The Homunculus Approach: External Perspective
While reorganizing tasks provides immediate clarity, developing a broader perspective requires a different approach. This is where the concept of being a new homunculus becomse valuable. At first it might seem a bit hard to see the outside perspective, but just try it often enough, and it will probably eventually work. An easy way to learn this is to write a “homunculus text” every couple of months, or when facing a change of pace. When I began this a couple of years ago, I had a question pattern1 that I wrote answers for each time in a session of a couple of hours. I simultaneously started to automatize the process, using moments here and there when facing a challenging situation to learn how to step outside of myself with the goal of seeing the situation as objectively as possible. A perhaps useful question to ask yourself is: “What would you advise if someone important to you asked the same question from you?”. These days I can get to the “homunculus mode”, i.e. think about my path and situation without external tools, but it remains useful to occasionally reflect in written manner.
It is similarly refreshing to brainstorm and test your ideas instead of just pushing through a pre-set path for long enough to forget what was the purpose of the path. Human beings form habits in very short time spans, and it is all too easy to fall into Goodhart’s law. For this kind of work, I definitely like Raemon’s simple collection of prompts for big-picture planning. Strongly recommended to go through some of these regularly.
A third mechanism to keep you orientated is to learn some form of focusing. I’ve never succeeded completely in the classic Gendlin focusing, but I developed something similar to it. With enough training2, I was able to create an exercise of four internal prompts and strict mental ritual that allows me to clear my head if it feels foggy or something nags me but I’m not certain what it is. I’ve had a success rate of 100 % on this in the past year, which is quite encouraging: if you feel disconnected, disorientated or foggy often or regularly, it might well be useful to learn something similar.
Practical Tools and Techniques
These foundational practices of reorganizing and maintaining perspective form the core of keeping the focus. However, when facing particularly demanding periods, additional tactical approaches can prove invaluable.
If you are having a lot on the plate but you feel confident that you have enough energy to smash some results, I have enjoyed the game of mattering.3 It is a wonderful tool for several purposes: it forces you to not use excessive time on any given task, it creates external time pressure, it allows you to form a coherent overview of what needs to be done, and gamification is surprisingly efficient on most people. This approach creates a steady stream of small wins, triggering dopamine releases that help maintain pace throughout the day. The strength of this effect varies personally, but for me it has been very powerful, as I am both naturally wired and self-conditioned to receiving dopamine from clearing pre-set tasks - the bigger the better.
So, when I feel that there’s a lot of going on but I can handle it, I take a sheet of paper, make a grid made of 30-minute slots for one to five days, and start filling it. I have done this for the entire days, controlling the whole day, but it might not be for everyone - using it for, say, six hours could already give the boost it is meant to give. It certainly won’t work over extended periods of time, but it is fun and nice way to clear your head of tasks that you really want to do.
While the game of mattering works well for intense periods of focus, a contrasting approach proves effective for long-term sustainability. I call this technique under-promise, over-deliver.4 When making commitments and plans for yourself, give yourself some leeway. Put a doable task’s deadline not for tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow; allocate an hour for something that could probably be done in half;5 postpone a secondary task which you could actually do basically anywhere if needed. If you do this correctly, you end up doing stuff in advance of your own calendar, sometimes in a major way.6 It gives you a significant energy boost and a major sense of achievement without technically doing anything differently. Most importantly, it keeps your head a bit more free, as you know you have enough time to finish your tasks and probably also some extra time if you need to allocate more for the things you currently have on table. Even if you never end up needing more time, the feeling of having it is most important.
Maintaining mental clarity
Lastly, I would like to note that the effectiveness of these organizational methods ultimately depends on maintaining your mental and physical energy. Two types of activities prove essential for sustaining this vital force: immersive experiences and physical activity. Both of these serve the same function of clearing up your mind and offering your neural circuits some variations and respite from the work projects. Consistency is here more important than intensity, though it is recommended to do intense physical training for it’s own sake as well. Taking care of this combination can simply be reading an intriguing book, doing a good workout and going to sauna. Do not overlook them, but don’t overthink them either.
What have I concretely achieved towards my goals since last time I wrote; general remarks and notes on the period of time; how is my daily life structured, and could it be more efficient; do I rest while moving; what strategic tools I could realistically implement to enhance achieve my goals; how and why I am not where I aim to be; if I would go X time backwards, what would I do differently?
It took me maybe five times to make it work well, after I discovered what where the key questions for myself and how I approach them mentally.
Though I would note that my allocated tasks look very different from Katja’s! You don’t need to put “obvious” stuff there; just stuff that you need to remind yourself to get done.
As an inner technique here; this same principle can be used to positively surprise people in your, say, work environment regularly, but I won’t discuss it’s other uses here.
Though here planning fallacy should be understood well for this to work.
I should probably note here that I have not submitted a single assignment in my life late or even close to the deadline, partially due to my methods in planning, including this trick.