Are task lists good for our mental health? (Part 1)
I'd not really thought about the worth of myself until I recently read John Niland's new book The Self Worth Safari.
The book describes how self worth and self esteem are two very different things. Self worth being something that shouldn’t change, an art of being kind to yourself no matter what. Self-esteem being a preoccupation with self, so it fluctuates depending on how you positively and negatively react to circumstance, environment, other people, and the voices in your own head.
John discusses the various esteem modes that we get in to. Such as Victim mode where we have a pity party about what the world's done to us now. And Worry mode, where we try to be a constant problem solver to everything around us.
Continually monitoring ourselves
But one mode he mentions really caught my eye from a productivity perspective, Task mode. This is where our self-esteem is linked to our task lists and how much of it we have done….or not done.
We've all been there. Writing a long list of everything we "think" is urgent and "must" be done today. Only to beat ourselves up when only half of it gets done because one task took 3 times as long as we thought to finish. Or maybe we were interrupted by a colleague or phone call which gobbled up an hour of our "valuable" time. And during that time our Task mode thinking was singing in our ear to say "You must get back to the task list, or it wont be completed, and then you will have failed……and you don’t want to be a failure!"
There may also be resentment creeping in too, to the colleague, or person on the other end of the phone (although not expressed out loud, just again in your head). "Can’t you see that I'm busy and have all these things to do?".
Worry and Anger
This would be Anger mode appearing, using other people as a smoke-screen for the frustration you have with "you". Eroding further our self esteem, and our feeling of self worth. We also bring in Worry mode too. We attempt to switch off at the end of the day (or at the weekend), but our brains are scanning around, trying to think of anything that we might have missed off doing that day that could come back to bite us in the future.
Addicted to being busy
But let's delve a little deeper into this idea of task mode. Why do we create a list in the first place if all its doing is stressing us out. Well we get that little dopamine hit, that natural chemical high every time we strike off a task, getting closer and closer to our goal of completion. And each time we do it, we want another hit. It's addictive!
We also like seeing that we are making progress, moving in the right direction. We want to gain a sense of achievement, not by finishing the day and being asked (or asking yourself) what your day was like in a nutshell. Do we want the answer to be "Just busy", or do we want to answer "I've been productive and made progress"?
Task lists enable us to define our work for the day. We've not only stated what we intend to do, more importantly we've stated what we are not going to do. So in this respect it aids focus, and we don't have to "think about" our work for the rest of the day, we just get on with the work.
In Part 2 I'll be exploring how we could create lists in a different way, that may alleviate some of the stresses they can bring.