Starting the New Year right

January is the time to start fresh or upgrade your plan from the previous year. Here are some pointers to keep in mind when you put together a strategy:

1. Look at your priorities. Are you focusing on projects that directly relate to your goals and priorities or are you spending time and energy on unimportant activities?

2. Ask yourself "why". When you reorganize your life and schedule, ask why your current situation isn't working.

3. Tackle one project at a time. In the excitement of starting fresh it is easy to begin several new initiatives at once. Before you tackle each individual project, lay out the exact steps needed to accomplish each goal.

4. Reward your efforts. Change can be hard so acknowledge your forward progress, no matter how small!

The problem with overcommitment

I have been reading ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life by Judith Kolberg and Kathleen Nadeau. This small portion on over committing our time was quite accurate. We cannot possibly organize our physical space if our time is stretched too thin: 

 Overcommitment is the commitment of your time beyond its availability

"If overcommitment is typical for you, you may even feel a sense of pride, at times, about the number of things you are involved in. As you rush from one activity to the next, you may not be aware of the cost, to yourself and to the people around you, of overcommitment. When you're up against the wall, struggling to meet a deadline, you quickly look for that individual that it is least costly to disappoint. Many people have fallen into a pattern of robbing their personal lives to compensate for professional overcommitment.

 For others... overcommitment results from approval seeking and difficulty in setting limits on the demands made by others. Some individuals live with a frantic seesaw of imbalance, trying to measure on a daily basis whether they should sortchange their jobs to meet their family's needs, or whether to disappoint the family and keep the boss happy. You pay a high cost for overcommitment on a daily basis. 

You pay with a high stress level because you are habitually late. You pay with chronic fatigue becuase your overcommitment doesn't leave time for eight hours of restful sleep. Many people... become almost proud of their ability to meet the crisis (often a crisis of their own creation) and prove the critics wrong. "I told you I'd get it done!" Sometimes adults... become hooked on the excitement of crisis management as a lifestyle. For others, overcommitment only leads to chronic anxiety because their life feels out of control and they can't find a way to keep a balance."