All of the above steps require collecting, holding and manipulating pointers to tasks.
We need to keep track of our tasks. We need them laid out in front of us, so we can see where we are, and what remains to be done. Otherwise, we’re facing the unknown, lost underneath the canopy of unfinished tasks, unable to discern a way out.
To plod along half blind, to pick tasks at random and in isolation, is to go round and round in circles. We end up roaming the same terrain, over and over again, busy with the minutiae of life, getting nothing done.
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In a world inundated with information, it’s not enough to approach tasks the way our ancestors did. We need tools and procedures, to maximize our cognitive throughput.
Six thousand years ago, writing took over from human memory, as a means of bookkeeping. Today, we need a different kind of bookkeeping, to track our tasks, in various stages of completion.
Without it, you won’t get very far.
And just as memory was no longer a dependable medium – in the face of the increasing complexity of human society, so too, the mind is not the place for the bookkeeping related to our tasks, any more.
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And the mind knows this, and it lets us know, too, by way of anxiety, and stress.
It is a job of some of the oldest circuitry in the brain to monitor where we are, where we’d like to go, and our progress on that path. Any time progress is in question, the threat circuitry pings the conscious mind, sending anxiety vibrating against the walls of our being, interrupting our cognitive CPU, and drawing our attention.
It drives us to take stock of the situation and take corrective action. It keeps us on the straight and narrow, warning us if we veer too far.
If your life is overflowing with tasks and to-dos, to the point where you can’t really keep track of all the things that need tracking, the anxiety that you feel is your threat circuitry calling, reminding you of the dangers lurking in the overgrown underbrush of your world, of snakes in the grass, unfinished tasks, and the danger of something critical falling through the cracks.
So long as that nagging worry keeps popping up into consciousness, it takes up registers in working memory, reducing the total capacity available for actual work.
This makes sense: anxiety is there to prevent us from focusing on the task at hand, so that we turn attention to the threat lying in wait.
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But, anxiety is not the end of the story.
When you’re lost in the jungle with tasks looming on every side, you can’t see your progress. Every place looks the same. The more you do, the more remains to be done.
And that is demoralizing.
Such is the fate of traveling without a map.
Such is the fate of an expedition without proper tools.
