We’ve reached the end of the first month of 2025.
How are you doing with your personal development journey so far?
You’ve been consistent with your efforts? Great, keep it up!
If you feel like there’s so much to do? Then, today’s newsletter is dedicated to you.
Ambition and planning ain’t enough
For people like you and I, we have goals, ambitions and dreams of becoming ‘successful’.
While the definition of success is personal, it is likely one that requires you to hit certain milestones before you are satisfied. And you know that the path ahead of you to reach your ultimate point of success is not easy, nothing worth having comes easy.
If you wrote your 10-year Odyssey plan, you know that there’s so many things that need to be built first to act as your foundation. You have to juggle multiple projects and see them through before you can move on to the next phase. And for each project, there are plenty of tasks that need to be done, habits to develop and things to think about.
There are just so many things to do.
On top of all of this, you have your regular duties and responsibilities.
- You need to make sure you continue to perform well at work.
- You need to take care of your spouse, children, and/or parents.
- You need to manage your own home, keep it clean and keep it in order.
And all these can be stressful. There are so many things to track. So many things to do. It can all be overwhelming.
The Genius Inside of You
But I believe that we all have the ability to juggle our responsibilities and personal growth projects – all at the same time.
Rather, I believe that developing all Areas of Growth in parallel is the best approach for personal growth.
You and I have the innate ability to become multi-talented savants and multi-skilled polymaths. We were born as sponges that can absorb any competencies that we put our hearts into, and nothing can change this fact.
Want proof? You are a living proof of this simple fact of life.
Pause and observe your own self and what you have been doing for the past year. You may have not consciously chosen the path that you’re currently on, but I bet my ass that you have done well in making the best of your current circumstances.
You’ve worked hard day-in and day-out to push yourself in your job, while managing your personal finances to secure a more stable future.
You’ve put in effort in managing your physical health as best you can through exercise and some dieting, while still making meaningful sacrifices when it comes to spending a good time with your loved ones.
Despite feeling tired and not having much time, you still push yourself to upskill by reading books, articles or watching videos, all the while knowing that you need to balance it out with giving yourself time and space to recuperate your mind and soul.
No one really taught you how to do all this.
But you still did it anyway for the past year. So, kudos to you! 👏🏻
“But, why do I feel stressed and tired all the time?”
“Just the thought of having to do personal projects overwhelm me and I feel like giving up.”
The problem here is not that you lack the ability to do it all.
You can do it all. And you have been.
The problem here is that you keep everything that you WANT and NEED TO DO in your mind.
It is the cognitive overload as a result of maintaining many open loops in your brain that is taxing you.
Too-Much-To-Do Syndrome
The theory of open loops draws from the Zeigarnik Effect, named after psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, who observed that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones. This suggests that our brains are wired to keep these tasks in mind until they are resolved, creating a psychological burden.
Put simply, our brains open up loops when we think of things to do.
And these open loops take up mental power, and hence cause mental stress.
In addition to the many responsibilities of adult life and social life that are already on our plate, our attention is being pulled in every conceivable direction by the millisecond anytime we are online on our smartphones or computer. All these things create open loops in our heads as they prod us to learn more, buy that thing, add it to our to-do list and more.
This can manifest as anxiety, especially when these loops involve significant or emotionally charged tasks. The stress response is part of the brain’s attempt to prioritize and manage these loops, but if too many are active simultaneously, it can overwhelm.
Beyond open loops, cognitive load theory suggests that our working memory has limited capacity. When this capacity is exceeded by numerous open loops, cognitive overload occurs, which can significantly increase stress and reduce our efficiency in handling tasks.
If not kept in check, the open loops will cognitively overload you. You will end up falling prey to the too-much-to-do syndrome:
You know that there is so much to do, but you end up doing nothing at all.
So how do we overcome this?
How to be more Action-oriented
While it is great to have a Growth Mindset, it is not useful if we just end up filling our heads with things we want to do, but never end up taking any action.
Here’s 4 steps we can do to overcome analysis paralysis, and become more action-oriented:
1. Realise that your brain is for thinking, not tracking
Your brain is not optimised for keeping track of tasks for the long-run. As you accumulate more and more to-do’s in your mind, it will eventually start hitting a limit and you will start feeling mentally stressed.
While remembering 1 or 2 tasks for a short period of time is fine, it is best to brain dump those to-do’ into an external action tracker. This will help close those open loops.
As you make brain dumping into a habit, you will find that there are less things in the back of your mind, making it clearer and hence more effective in doing what it does best: thinking and problem solving.
2. Build a trusted tracker for your actions
While brain dumping is great for clearing cognitive load, it only truly works if you store what you need to do into task tracker(s) that you can trust.
What I mean by a trusted tracker here is a place where you can safely store and rediscover the actions you need to do. By writing out your actions in this place, you know you will see those actions again and not forget about them.
This could be as simple as a notebook or a note-taking app on your phone, or as sophisticated as a 12-Week Grind or a PARA system.
I would avoid writing it on loose post-it notes or papers as you can easily lose them. Similarly, if you rarely open your note-taking app, then you should avoid it too. Your tracker’s trustiness refers to how reliable it is to remind you of the action and prompting you to execute it.
3. Set context-boundaries to your actions
While having one notebook or note-taking app where you dump all your actions may work for some, for most people, this is ineffective.
You are most likely going to end up with a very, very long list of actions which you will then end up not completing. That is just creating cognitive overload with more steps.
Instead, consider setting boundaries to those actions. General ones which would be useful for most people are:
(1) Work-personal boundaries:
Have a separate action tracker for your work than your personal projects. So that when you’re at the office or in work-mode, you can focus on the actions that matter then.
(2) Location and time boundaries:
You can separate what you need to do at home versus at the gym. For example, leave a small notebook in your gym bag to track your actions at the gym.
You can also use your calendar to specify day or time specific actions. For example, setting a calendar event every Sunday morning to ensure that you complete house chores is a good way to set aside time-bound actions.
4. Focus on your immediate to-do’s only
The point of building trusted action trackers is so that you can pour 100% of focused effort into your immediate to-do’s.
Instead of having to use your brain power worrying about other tasks that need to be done, you should be using your whole mind in getting the task at hand done. After all, you only progress by actually getting things done.
But with so many things to juggle, having a trusted action tracker becomes an even more critical tool for lifelong learners like you and I.
I know that you want to do a lot, and achieve many things.
And because of that, you have a lot of things on your mind about what you need to do.
But having them all in your mind is counter-productive.
To be productive in your personal growth, you must be in the habit of emptying your mind.
As Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen Buddhist monk and author said;
“If your mind is empty,
it is always ready for anything;
it is open for everything.”
Till next week,
Ruiz