Systems overload
I stumbled across Luddlife yesterday, via Oh My Blog, and chunks of the site's message have stayed lodged firmly in my brain. My increasing confidence that the content of the site is the work of an LLM notwithstanding, I find myself trying to really sit with the idea that I don't need to spend every waking moment trying to optimise my productivity and doing something.
There's a discomfort in that. Partly, I think, born of a decade or more of disquiet with who I am, and needing to distract myself from that introspection with constant, rampant activity. There were whole months of my twenties where I barely stopped and saw the inside of my house. I was always doing something, and always had somewhere to be. Today, even with a greater sense of self-assuredness, there remains a lingering sense of not doing enough. Like my body hasn't quite caught up to my brain. That's trauma, I guess.
Back then, I relied upon a slowly constructed system of organisation that enabled me to stay on top of everything, and kept me able to do the things I wanted to do as well as the things I had to. Today, I still retain a long list of things I want to do, but my systems for doing so have all but collapsed. I've tried a dozen or more different frameworks, systems, and toolkits for trying to wrangle the increasing busyness of my inner world into some form of order. I enjoyed my highly simplified version of Bullet Journal for a time1, but it wasn't practical for recurring tasks. I spent six months trying to make Johnny Decimal my system for managing, well, everything. That felt like too much overhead and complexity. I've dabbled with PARA, and even experimented with developing my own system.
There are so many concepts, systems, frameworks, tools, and ideas in my brain about how I should be doing things, organising my time, and approaching my life. Pomodoro, Getting Things Done, Eat the Frog, Kanban, Eisenhower Matrices. I've tried a ton, and I'm at the point where there is so much of this stuff rattling around my brain that I feel like a Windows 98 PC in need of defragging. There's too much, and it's all gumming me up when I try to settle do anything.
All at once I'm trying to write an album, write a new D&D campaign, study for a certification, get a GRC, organise a holiday, prepare to sell the house, finish working on this website, make a quilted book sleeve, make a CO2 monitor for my home office, unify my homelab configuration under Ansible with CI/CD to automatically deploy changes, learn to draw pixel art, lose 10kg. And that's not even all of it! And it doesn't even take into account the day-to-day maintenance of being a parent, partner, daughter, friend, and employee. Nor does it consider all the books, movies, shows, games, albums I want to consume.
There is too much to do, and not enough time to do it. I keep thinking that if I can find the One True System, then I'll finally crack it, and do all the things I want to do, and free up space for all the other things I want to do in future. But instead, my mind feels sluggish, and I can't settle to anything other than trying to figure out how to keep all of this straight in my head and on my devices. On Sunday I spent an hour and a half reorganising notes files in Obsidian, which isn't even the first time I'd done that that week!
AI-written or not (and I'm pretty sure it is), Luddlife does get right the idea that this need to optimise every single second of every day is pretty damn toxic. I feel utterly insane, and kept completely prisoner by this weird, intrinsic need to be Productive. The fact that I can't seem to do any of the things I care about doing is making me feel like a failure. The inability to find a way through this mire is making me feel like I'll forever be a failure.
Wherever this feeling of enforced productivity came from (*cough CAPITALISM *cough), I hate it. It makes me loathe myself when I can't do more than simply to get through a normal day and collapse onto the sofa of an evening after the kids are abed, and think "I'll try again tomorrow." It makes me hate myself that I hate myself. I am overloaded. There are too many systems jockeying for position in my mind, waving at me like sirens and singing their promise of unleashed Productivity. God I hate that word.
And I think I know the answer. You can't half-ass two things2. I have to pick one, and see it through to the end. But I've forgotten how to do that. I don't remember how to focus on the thing I want to do, and not the idea of optimising the living daylights out of it. I don't even remember how to choose the one thing I want to do. Maybe there's a system for that.
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