Something I'm paying a lot of attention to the last few months is retraining, or resetting certain habits that have become an automatic activity or action over the years. It's quite tricky sometimes, and it's quite hard not to shoot into either extreme ends of retraining yourself, where one is not doing anything at all, and the other is doing everything all at once.

One that I would like to talk about today is: prioritising.

I never realised this was the root problem of many things. Let's not call it a root problem, let's call it a root habit. A struggle I often ran into was trying to make everybody happy at the cost of my own happiness. This ended up in having to reschedule things, re-plan things or even cancel things entirely - which in the end only caused annoyances for everybody involved. The odd thing is, scheduling or prioritising things for others (like projects, deadlines, tasks) I can do fine. The struggle lies into quickly falling into my old pattern, which is overloading myself with all kinds of activities and tasks, losing sight over what is most important for myself at that time.

My way of going about this is: journals! I keep a calendar for my weekly tasks that involve work and school, while I keep a personal daily task list for things that I need to do during that day. If something is passed on to the next day, I make sure that it won't affect the things of today.

During projects, I write everything down, if it's something someone said at the spur of a moment, or during a meeting, or just during a normal workday. I write every single thing down. There's viable information everywhere.

When blogging about it like this, it all seems so very simple. It sounds like there's an easy fix and I shouldn't complain. It's true though, there is nothing to complain about! Habits are a weird thing, and they become even weirder when working on getting rid of them.

On another note, I managed to break a habit today that I had going for the last ten years. In secret, I'm actually quite proud of myself!

Have a good Sunday, everyone.

Liefs,

Nathalie