First of all, I managed to transfer a lot of reminders into an online task list (it feels so great throwing away the little slips of paper!).
Then I researched and selected some possible Mind Map-type templates for capturing and organizing the Big Ideas that have been floating around my brain. Those ideas often feel vague and overwhelming; my hope is to ground them by getting them written down.
I even uploaded a bunch of photos from Dad’s birthday party into the shared photo album!
All in all, I’m feeling cautiously hopeful that I’ve turned a corner…and have returned to a more productive frame of mind and energy flow.
Music notes are one thing. I never find them overwhelming.
Well, certainly not now, when I never play music of any real difficulty. But even when I was a professional flutist, I had to learn lots of music that was extremely complex and downright hard. But I never found it overwhelming.
These kind of notes are another story altogether.
This is a stock photo, of course. Trust me, my accumulation of notes isn’t nearly this neat and colorful and fun.
I know, I know — there are better ways to jot down reminders and random thoughts than on little slips of paper, but I’ve never yet been able to consistently adopt a better approach.
So, I write the things I need to remember on a slip of paper. Then I remember something else that goes on another (but the same color) slip of paper. And I maybe accomplish one item from the first slip and two items from the second, but I can’t throw away the slips of paper because there are items that haven’t been completed yet. Which means I’ve already got a couple of slips at the start of the next day…and on and on it goes.
Until after a week (or a month…or more), I’ve got separate little mounds of notes waiting to be sorted through, organized, and discarded. Meanwhile, my brain is busy trying to remember the really important items for which I can no longer find the darn slip of paper!
And that’s what makes it overwhelming. But tomorrow I’m going to sit down with a notepad and the current accumulation and JUST DO IT!
