Someday Shelf
A concept that removed a lot of guilt pangs that were lingering in me and put to rest a lot of to-dos that were prancing around in my otherwise active monkey mind.
Someday shelf is an idea of putting what is lingering as ideas or plans in our work or life spectrum to a list, which needs a review after a stipulated time. Putting them in “Someday Shelf” in mind or paper and reviewing the same in say 6 months and evaluating if this being relevant then. This as a concept helps you to recalibrate your course of action and helps us prioritize what is important and act on things without urgency.
We have gotten into a habit of working on things in urgency, which makes us experience a great adrenalin rush at that time, but in the long term exhausts you and doesn’t allow us the sustained feeling of joy. In the present world, if you aren’t juggling several things in a day, you deem yourself to be less productive and we let the world perceive us to be less of a superhuman. Since you are anyways doing these many, why don’t I add one more task to your list, would be the mentality in which the world operates. The truth is already all the activities do get affected if the list is long. Yes, everyone’s capabilities are different, but none of us can multiplex on more than 2 activities in the same time frame.
When young, professionally you tend to take up all that comes your way. Isn’t that considered the most proactive approach? If you don’t do that wouldn’t there be a judgment passed by the team, as you are an inflexible employee? The same holds good for our personal fronts too. You would be considered to be a sloth, who is not interested and forthcoming. On the contrary, say we do one task, and as Mathew McConaughey says,
“I was making B’s in 5 things,” he said. “I want to make A’s in 3 things.”
and celebrate the joy received. Things achieved would be much more appreciable by self too. Instead of getting affected by the guilt of not having done it all and being miserable and beating yourself up. This almost can become a fear in you, which affects us in many ways. I realized that conditioning and self-talk which I used to do as a young adult on not doing enough, manifested as a fear which was deep-seated and took away a lot of joys of appreciating professional and personal achievements which were of great gravitas, but in my self-critical mind of mine, trivial.
The LinkedIn post which inspired this is here, where Steven Bartlett elaborates on this idea by taking the example of Mathew McConaughey. Steven Bartlett
