As I was struggling to do a complete 555 routine yesterday, I noticed that many of thoughts that came galloping into my head were of the “shit I haven’t done but should do” variety.
I then remembered this paragraph from Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now:
The psychological condition of fear is divorced form any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now. You are in the here and now, while your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap. And if you are identified with your mind and have lost touch with the power and simplicity of the Now, that anxiety gap will be your constant companion. You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection — you cannot cope with the future.
And then I remembered that I bought this book about a year ago but never read it: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen (website here). Here’s a snip from his Chapter 1 (the full text is available on Barnes and Noble):
The big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can’t do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you need to do something, and store it in your RAM, there’s a part of you that thinks you should be doing that something all the time. Everything you’ve told yourself you ought to do, it thinks you should be doing right now. Frankly, as soon as you have two things to do stored in your RAM, you’ve generated personal failure, because you can’t do them both at the same time. This produces an all-pervasive stress factor whose source can’t be pinpointed. Most people have been in some version of this mental stress state so consistently, for so long, that they don’t even know they’re in it. Like gravity, it’s ever-present-so much so that those who experience it usually aren’t even aware of the pressure. The only time most of them will realize how much tension they’ve been under is when they get rid of it and notice how different they feel.
So now that I’m aware of how often I’m entertaining anxiety about the undone, I’m more motivated to read Allen’s book and get it resolved. Or it could end up being just another “should” on my shitlist. We’ll see. I just searched this Real Joe weblog and discovered that I first wrote about Allen’s book back on May 17, 2002. And then, omigod, again exactly one year ago. I guess that’s a sign. 😉