What to do or What not to do? The mindset!

Since my childhood, I have developed some habits that caused a lot of stress and anxiety. Without realising it causes stress and it is something that can be sorted, I kept on living with that and suffered for years. Had I dealt with them differently, I could have made situation better.

One of those habits was forgetting where have I left something and spending a lot of time in trying to find it. It was not long ago, when I was already late for work, it was raining and cold, the nearest bus stop was going through maintenance, on top of that I forgot my bus pass at home. I had to go back but still I couldn’t find it. That raised question, why does it happen to me? To solve the problem, I decided that from now on I will have a set place for things and I will not put them anywhere else. That solved the problem.

But the even more important thing that I learnt from that experience was knowing that this is stressful and with a little change in the way you do things or think slightly differently can possibly solve the problem; proved to be a turning point. It was never that easy to solve the problem and the even bigger problem was realising the fact that this is a problem. I kept on thinking and slowly but surely things slightly improved.

Until recently, I have been dealing with another problem and that seems to affected many other individuals. I was struggling with time because of a busy schedule. It was another afternoon but I was facing the same problem “lack of time”. I started looking into the list of things and realised I can focus on the most important tasks. This seemed to be another realisation that I could have prioritised from the beginning?

But I continued prioritising things, being more conscious and more aware. It was not the solution to the problem. But unintentionally I started developing the habit of prioritising the tasks and the fact that I should not do some of the tasks. Rather than looking at the tasks I want to do, I started looking at the tasks that I shouldn’t do.

It seemed a mindset change. After careful thinking, I realised that when you think for the things to do was like a wish list. I was not prioritising things and my situation, mood, environment and many other factors impacted the things that I actually did. Though, that may not have been the things that I would have ideally done.

Thinking about the things that I should not do, dramatically reduced the list of things that I actually did. The most important driving force was the built-in priority mechanism and the question that should I really do this now? It was a cut down list of things, to things that I really wanted to do. Doing this made me feel lot more relaxed and focussed.