Are you storing your tasks in your body?

And feeling the resulting constant tension... | 100 DoW #36

You can only store so many things in your body.

You’re going through your day, but you feel this tension in your body—you’re not really questioning it cause you’re so busy and you feel like this all the time¹—but when you do stop to feel and notice that tension, suddenly a thought pops up:

“Ah, I still need to reply to that awful work email!” Or, “Ah, that’s right, the bathroom floor has a leak that I need to take care of.” (Or something else that you still need to do.)

Your body was keeping a background process running of “Don’t forget to do that thing, beep-boop!”²

As we’re busy creatures—and getting busier every year—we fall into the trap of having a neverending to-do list. It’s OK to have a neverending list of things to do, btw, but the fallacy here is thinking that you can store all the tasks in your body-mind all the time.

getting busier every year

Maybe that was fine in an era before digital communication, but nowadays, there’s just too much information coming in that we feel we need to do something with. Our brains get overloaded with things to do and respond to (no wonder we flock to meditation, mindfulness, etc.).

As our brains get overloaded, we start storing the things we feel we need to do, in our bodies. And it feels like tension. It’s a low-level anxiety in your body that ”helps” you to remind yourself of something to do. This is very useful if it’s for life-changing decisions you need to make, but not for everyday tasks or replying to emails.

So we’re stuck with our bodies in the anxiety-achiever mode because we weren’t made for this flood of information and constant decision-making.

Closing off and turning our back on the digital age is an option some choose, but not one that’s sustainable, I think. Instead, it’s important that we learn two things:

1. New skills in task management. “Productivity,” you might say… but not for the sake of becoming more productive—as many productivity gurus say—but to be more mindful of our productivity.³ So we smoothly and effortlessly flow from task to task without using our body as a computer’s RAM.

2. Listen to our body. Like, really listen to it. Ask it questions as if it’s conscious (cause it is), and then listen to what pops up. Maybe there’s something you keep putting off that produces 80% of the tension you feel.

Ok, hopefully, this perspective is somewhat helpful to you. And I’d like to challenge you to feel, just for a short moment, if there’s some tension in your body and ask where it comes from.

Cheers!

Jibran

1. Except maybe when you’re away on vacation. Cause then you unconsciously know you can’t pick up all those tasks that are waiting for you at home…

2. I think this idea popped into my mind after listening to

visakan veerasamy

and Malcolm Ocean chat somewhere online. Not sure where, though.

3. Anne-Laure talks a bunch about mindful productivity as well.