A few weeks ago I wrote about my many, many projects on The One-Year Tightrope. Shortly after, I wrote a post about how to remedy the problem of having too much on your plate. Unfortunately, I failed to take my own advice and have found myself suffering burnout for just about every project I’ve attempted to work on since then.
Over the last couple days, I transferred my life organizational system from a simple text file to using Evernote, in order to have automatic back-ups, organized lists (as in, by project, rather than just one long list), and other features. I also made a list of all the things I have left unfinished since I started this so-called vacation. Things like abandoned websites trended toward the top while phone calls I had forgotten to make clumped at the bottom.
To be perfectly honest, I am not too shocked I underwent burnout. So I decided to dedicate today to taking an official hiatus from trying to work on anything – an official day to laze around doing nothing.
But then the fancy struck me – I need to be productive. I’ve been feeling lazy and down on myself for long enough now.
I’ve noticed the less I do, the more cranky I get, while being superproductive and efficient and getting a million things done in a day makes me feel happy.
So I ask you, dear readers: How on Earth do you stay sane?
My Personal Recipe for Disaster
First, thanks to Chris Brogan for helping me to discover this topic.
I have been reflecting an awful lot lately on how and I am. I want to know who I am and how I think and to understand everything that goes on in my head because I know that is the only way to be successful and happy. One of my many discoveries is that I have failed many more times than I care to share. While reflecting on these failures, which I will consider learning experiences, I have discovered a deadly concoction I am about to share with you: my personal recipe for disaster, absolute failure, and misery.
It starts with feedback
One unfortunate thing about me is that I absolutely love constructive criticism and seek it out constantly. As such, I hear a lot of destructive criticism from acquaintances who lack empathy. This is where failure begins: as soon as somebody dislikes me or something I have done or created, my mind begins its dark voyage into hyperpersonal (is too a word!) land, a place where every off-color comment ever is intentionally seeking to dethrone you and is absolutely true in all cases. So, “I think the spacing is a little off,” means, “You think you’re good enough to be designing websites, huh?” which suddenly transforms into, “You suck,” which is a comment that I hear often in my own head, usually a few seconds after somebody mutters something about a logo placement.
Hyperpersonality (is also a word!)
When taking things hyperpersonally, a person generally senses something that does not exist. For instance, jealousy. A healthy (hah!) person taking a slight, such as a rejected credit card application or a comment about color schemes, hyperpersonally will think, “He’s just jealous of my awesome skills. I’ll just ignore him,” and carry on with her day. Meanwhile, when I take something hyperpersonally, I internalize it and think, “Oh my goodness there must be a reason for this,” and point out every single flaw within the realm of the physical, the mental, and the emotional to myself, trying to identify which one is the reason for the failed credit acquisition or why somebody would hate me enough to insult my taste in fonts.
Exhibit 1
As an example, today, I scrapped a lot of decent material because of my recent rejection from a position with a call center. I felt like maybe I couldn’t do anything right. It was as if I was a failure, rather than a person who had failed. So I “knew” that everything I had done was wrong and I needed to start fresh. So away went months or years of work.
I came to my senses a short while later with no idea what happened. I had lost a lot and I was in shock. It was time to rebuild. So here I am reflecting on what I’ve done and feeling bad for it, and Googling for a solution to deleted files.
How do you know when disaster is about to strike? You can’t. But what you can do is know what causes these personal issues to come upon you. I know now that little failures and poor feedback can set me off, so I can either learn to roll with the punches or do my best to avoid them altogether. If I figure out that latter one, I’ll let you in on my secrets.
What leads you into disaster?