I have decision paralysis in organizing my work and self-study flow. While working on one thing, I keep agonizing as to if that’s what I should be doing and lose time doing so. I keep trying to let go of this mindset and I just fail.
How do I improve on this, how do I make sure that I don’t lose time while trying to buy time by optimizing my workload? Is my workload too much? Am I trying to achieve a lot of things at once? But if I don’t, I’ll probably never get to where I have to be, yet chasing all of this means I’ll be stuck in a spot for a long while, perhaps I let go of my dreams and just lay flat.
I try fixating certain tasks to certain times, I’ve cut down on a lot of things, creating a huge backlog that I might not go through in 10 lifetimes.
How do you make sure you do the things you have to do, when you have to do them and not feel like it’s a waste of time you should put elsewhere even after you’ve decided that the task at hand is paramount?
When I get decision paralysis (fairly often), I spend 15min drinking my yerba mate, smoking my cig, snacking on my fav cheeses, and thinking about random, unrelated stuff. It’s my way to force myself to slow down on purpose, and enjoy doing so, without the associated agony.
Then if I reach a conclusion I write it down. And, once I second think it, I tell myself in loud voice “you’re already in the paper, I already chose what to do, so get out of my head.” (Often alongside a mental image of myself picking the “copy” of the question inside my head, crumbling it down into a ball, and throwing it into a mental rubbish bin.)
Now, regarding workload optimisation: the key here is to acknowledge the fact that you won’t be 100% efficient, ever. So change the focus from “I need to optimise my workload” into “I need to fix obvious issues with my workload”. It sounds like a small difference, but it’s actually a big deal - it allows you to improve your workload without going out of your way to find small flaws with it.