If you feel you should be running at 100 percent capacity, you’re not doing yourself any favors. This week Janine and Shannon discuss personal capacity and how making sure you’re giving yourself plenty of room capacity-wise can help you be happier and less stressed.
Discussion topics include:
- How personal capacity is like the memory capacity of your computer or phone – when you fill it up, everything slows down
- The fact that it’s unreasonable to expect that you can function at 100 percent capacity
- How unnecessary thoughts can take up valuable personal capacity
- Letting go of worry so that you can use that energy for more important things
- The many things that factor into personal capacity, including having a realistic perception of how long something will take
- Managing your own expectations of what you can get done in a given amount of time
- Setting yourself up for success with a realistic task list
- Ways you can expand your capacity (hint: stop overthinking and close up your loops)
- Getting stuff out of your head and onto paper (or pixels) to free up your brain
Links:
- Shannon’s blog post on easing phantom energy draws
- For more talk on realistic task lists, see Episode 6: Task Management and Episode 36: Feeling Satisfied
This was a good podcast for me to listen to. For the last 20 days I have been going hell-for-leather in decluttering a public storage unit that had all the papers, photos, and tzotchkes that came out of my mother’s home after she died. In those 20 days, I have decluttered 50 boxes and discarded 6,000-7,000 photos. (If it didn’t have the person’s name on the back, and I don’t know them, out it went. Same for random shots of buildings and landscapes. Luckily for me, my mother had sat both of my grandmother’s down and said, “If you tell me who they are, I will write their names on the backs,” on their photos. I had started doing the same for Mom in the months before she died.)
In all, I decluttered 100 cubic feet of stuff (I don’t know if I’m doing the math right, but a 5×5 foot space containing 5 feet of stuff is, I think, 125 cubic feet [5x5x5], and now it’s down to a 5×5 foot space containing 1 foot of stuff, or 25 cubic feet [5x5x1]. What was stacked five-feet high is now one layer of boxes.)
When I reached those milestones yesterday, I realized that I had reached my limit, or personal capacity as you call it. I decided to take 10 days off before I started tackling the paper/snapshots/framed portraits clutter. I just can’t do anymore right now. So for these next 10 days, I intend to rest, relax, read, recreate, and reconnect. I am going to fill my well with experiences that I can think about when I start to do some more decluttering beginning on August 5th. And when I do, I am going to take your advice: If I am operating at 80%, that’s good enough. I don’t need to do this balls-to-the-wall, I just need to do it. Slow and steady, the tortoise wins the race, right?