Hi wallflowers! Today we’re talking anxiety, the dreaded to-do list and how to prioritize within it. (For me: love making ’em, hate getting started.) Many anxious people are intimately familiar with the art of avoidance. It is a coping strategy that backfires 100% of the time in the most obvious, detrimental way. I believe all avoidance that stems from anxiety to be for the same reason: to avoid (or postpone) discomfort. ‘Tis the “flight” in “fight or flight”.
how to prioritize when you’re anxious
Tell anyone you’ve got a problem prioritizing and they’ll ask you about the list. Like we’ve never heard of a to-do list before. But actually we anxious freelancers are often a list-making bunch. Personally, I feel a constant need to have everything down on paper otherwise—I don’t know—I’ll forget something major and let someone down or make a mistake or set my house on fire (Must. Remember. To. Blow. Out. Candles. Except that I’m so anxious I only light them when I know I’ll be home for 12 hours. Anyway.) So by time I create my to-do list, pretty much every task I could ever dream up is on it, and they all feel so important and necessary, and I think how on earth will I get all this done?! And either I shut off, cry, or dig in and realize that I’m going to feel bad about myself tonight when it’s only partly done. LITERALLY NO WINNING SCENARIO.
So my boyfriend’s like, “wow that’s a long to-do list, but did you prioritize it?”. I haven’t, so that’s what I do. I go through everything on my list and write down how long each will take, in hours, to complete. Then I pause and say, “Hmm, I see that I’ve added 46 hours of work to my to-do list” and, if I’m feeling reasonable, I’ll realize I need to split everything up across the week. In doing so I get myself down to an acceptable day’s work, but I still don’t really understand where to start.
We all have deadlines and the easiest way to meet them is to go in order—what needs to be done first? But when you’re anxious, you are thinking of a million other things besides what must be done first, and perhaps you’ve dug yourself quite the hole by procrastinating on several deadlines at once, and it truly feels like the answer is that this is a trick question and you must do it all at once or…. oh god, think of the consequences.
But guess what? Figuring out your TOP priority is actually not difficult when you have anxiety! The secret? All you do is take a look at your list and see which one makes your tummy churn the most. Voila! Priority 1.
While any long to-do list with competing deadlines can be overwhelming, the real challenge is which item is really triggering that uneasy feeling.
Because when you try to work on other things with that looming in the background, you’re bound to be slower, less focused, and way more exhausted by the end.
That’s why the top priority may not actually be the item that’s due first, or getting the most boring or annoying or difficult (skill-wise) task out of the way. It’s about taking your anxiety with you as you force yourself into this tough task, and getting it done anyway.
Once that “trigger” task—and whatever made you so uncomfortable about it—is out of the way, I find that focusing on the rest of the list is not so hard after all.
After the trigger task, you can move on to what is highest priority via deadline. (Generally speaking, some days are harder than others. You can also find the second most tummy-churning task, and so on.)
Over time you may notice a pattern. It depends what makes you anxious. Phone calls, sending invoices, and negotiating literally anything make me extremely uncomfortable—something that takes five minutes of focus might take me several days to mark done. So when I’m feeling up to it, I’ll take those on in the morning. But don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of times when anxiety wins, and I’m like yeah, I’m more comfortable putting that off until EOD.
It’s all about recognizing what’s weighing on you the most. Because once you get it out of the way, you’ve got like 5000 sq ft of mental space freed right on up. Think of all the activities!
SO THERE IT IS. That’s my secret. Fellow anxious freelancers, what’s your biggest struggle in creating your schedule?
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