Workaholics anonymous

[kirian]

Hello.... my name is Kirian and I over commit.

I've been over committing for years now, and have been trapped in an endless cycle of over-work, stress and low self-esteem.

I've come here today in the hope of finding other people who are in the same boat as me and seeing what they do to break the cycle of over-commitment, in the hope of finding some

Comments

[floralaetifica]

I have an unfortunate combination of the tendency to overcommit and the tendency to avoid work. At the moment, I'm using stuff I got from 'The 4 Hour Work Week' to deal with both. Lots of useful stuff there (worth reading), but amongst them are:

1. The 80-20 rule, whereby you find the 80% of stuff you do which is unnecessary time consuming crap and eliminate it
2. Differentiating between important and urgent, and prioritising urgent
3. Planning your day before you get to it, and then sticking to that plan
4. Setting tight deadlines (this is where the planning is important) to prevent you spending more time than is necessary on any given thing
5. Regularly stopping to check in on what you're doing and decide whether it's genuinely worth doing.

You could also perhaps use anti-impulse-buying techniques to help with the overcommiting - any time you want to take on a new project, stop yourself, then wait a certain period of time before deciding to give time for sanity to kick in. Helps me not buy more tango shoes. :)

Remember there's always much less time than you think there is. Part of my problem here is that sometimes I find myself with an unexpected half hour or so free, and then I can't think of anything I want to do, and I start thinking 'Would it be cool if I started writing a game/making myself a website/started a blog or some other distracting but non-essential thing. I think having a clear list of your projects helps here, because it reminds you you already have more than enough stuff.

Or, of course, you could reverse engineer it - do all the soul searching and discover the reasons you feel the need to overcommit - there will probably be some you're not yet aware of as well as the obvious ones - then use those to write little CBT challenges to your thinking on bits of card, and whip them out whenever you need to reaffirm them. For me, fear is at the root of most things. If I'm taking on something new, it's probably because all the things I currently have to do are frightening me, so I want to avoid them. In which case I could challenge those fears in order to do those things instead.

[bateleur]

Amusingly, I rate 0/5 of those as good!