Summertime can present an interesting tension for many of us.
On the one hand, we spend more time enjoying the world and the people we love, away from screens. On the other hand, those screens are how we often capture the gazillion ideas running through our heads.
For what itโs worth, many clients and readers have told me that part of their anxiety about going without a device for a few days (or longer) is they donโt know where theyโre going to capture ideas and to-dos. Even when I remind them about notecards and little notebooks, they feel overwhelmed at the prospect of getting all of those ideas and to-dos from analog into whatever digital tool they use to capture and track them.
In a post for another day, Iโll tackle whatโs really going on with this โcapture everythingโ anxiety, but, for today, Iโm going to focus on toolsets rather than mindsets.
What youโve probably experienced is that the problem with loose tasks and ideas isnโt how much time theyโre going to take to do, but that a) they donโt have a default home and b) they keep nagging you to remember them. By โdefault home,โ I donโt mean the 82 sticky notes all over the place. Those sometimes cause more swirl because you have to remember which ideas are on what stickies and where those stickies are.
Being away from your default home (and toolsets) is what makes the summertime especially spacy and ball-droppy for so many people. Per the usual, whenever you have a major change in context, you probably need to update your habits and tools to compensate.
Here are some tools that will help you find a home for those loose tasks and ideas:
When in doubt, go with the simpler option.
Printing out the Action Item Catcher so that you have a default home for those loose ideas and tasks may be more inefficient than 2 and 3 above, but itโs far more effective at making time and space than opening your phone, in most cases. Opening our devices is far more likely to lead toย being sucked into work when youโre out or accidentally falling into social media scrolling when you just meant to drop off a task or deliverable.
Whichever tools or methods you choose, focus on the capture aspect and save the sifting and sorting of those ideas for when youโre really back at work. The purpose here is to ease that โcapture everythingโ anxiety in the moment, and get back to enjoying your time away.
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