"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one." ~Albert Einstein
...that's all fine and dandy, but when it smacks us in the face with a task at hand (and, typically, hundreds of tasks at hand), how are we to survive the onslaught? How are we to stay productive? How are we to maintain our sanity in the face of all the things we have to get done, especiall when we watch them slip away? These are questions I've been asking myself lately and I've started developing thoughts on what, in reality, are the biggest killers of effective time/life management.
The biggest thing that hit me, as I was freaking out a particular deadline, was that the biggest killer of my own effeciency in life (and thus time), is stress - but not just any kind of stress. If we were to really observe stress and what it means, we'd see that it permeates every inch of our lives: we have stress to perform, we have stress to wake up and get to work, we have stress to do just about anything. In fact, even in the most basic sense, if we didn't have stress - we'd get nowhere. Stress is good, then - so when does it become a bad thing? In my opinion, it's when we start stressing out about it.
There always appears to be the odd side-effect of being a conscious creature where it's rarely "the problem" that is our problem, but the problems we make surrounding "the problem". These self-created problems are the ones that got in our way and made us ask, after we fixed the problem, "What really took me so long?" We are mental beings floating about in a physical world, and so it makes sense that 90% (or, probably greater) of all our troubles are self-inflicted and self-sustained. When I'm stressed, I get myself stressed about being so - because I get wound up about being anxious, and about how I'm going to make the deadline. The deadline is a stress to get a particular task done, but how stressed you get about it is up to you. For us computer programmers - we can define it as a recursive problem (and eventually we'll blow our stack).
When we're stressed we think less and panic more, we sleep less and therefore daydream more, we eat worse and therefore make ourselves sick, we fool around more in an attempt to hide that which stresses us - only to wake up and have it there again. When faced with a stress, then - try to observe how you react to it (the stress) and how stressed you get about it. When you feel the tasks mounting, do you start getting panic and start running around the house trying to find keys you threw somewhere as you were trying to accomplish something twenty minutes ago that you were also stressed about? Work with yourself instead of against yourself.
...just try observing how you stress about stress next time and wonder how much of your current problem is of your own making. How good are you at looking into a particular problem, and saying to yourself "It is what it is and this is the task, so let's solve it" with the least amount of stress as possible.
