Stress and productivity

This will be a short one, it's a summary for what's been up lately, and how I've been learning to deal with it. I'll also talk about my plans going forward.

So stress, that's something I've discovered in the last year is the major cause of all my foiled plans. To little stress and I'm not doing anything, just chilling and sleeping and having my own sweet time. Too much stress and everything shuts down, nothing gets done, and I'm finding excuses to avoid thinking about the state of my life. Which will lead me to spend a lot of time on the internet, reading funny things etcetera, hoping to not ever have to worry about the things that worry me. But eventually it takes it toll, live moves on there's work to catch up on, and I get increasingly more stressed out, since I abandoned any rate of work entirely.

Too little stress and nothing gets done, too much stress and nothing gets done, plus I reach this vicious cycle of non functionality and guilt.

Breaking out of the cycle is hard.

So the past year I've tried meditating, and that's helped a bunch, but ultimately stress won and I stopped meditating entirely because it made me think too much of the things I was failing to do. Additionally,  when there's so much stuff left to do that it's incomprehensible, I want a 'clean slate beginning' -- aka start meditating and doing cool exciting interesting things that will increase my productivity, but only after every other task that needs to be caught up on is over. In this specific case, I aim to get caught up on this blog completely before I start meditating again, because to me that's the 'on switch'. Not a great way to think about stress, because every time I write, I'm worried about everything else including mediation, every time I am unable to finish writing at a ridiculous pace, it's not just the writing that bothers me but the entire weight of everything I am responsible as well. Which again, stressful, again which makes me less productive, and the terrible cycle goes on and on.

The one way that's worked for me in the past is to declare/accept a loss, and move on. I have told myself, you know what, I'm never going to be doing everything else until I can start the important things, so why don't I just abandon the leftover ones, and start from scratch. And that's worked, but like in the long term it's taken a toll on how much output I produce.

The one way, the best way it appears, to handle all of this is to maintain a strict timetable, religiously live by routine and regiment, and have only extraordinary things break the timetable. And even if it's broken somehow, now worry about getting back 'right', and just jump back, whatever might happen. It's important to get things done right, true, but you can't get things right if you never end up doing then.

Or to repeat myself from the past, it's a lot better to half-ass things than to not do them at all.