As someone in her 20s, I have many interests I am exploring outside of my 9-5. Pursuing them makes me feel very fulfilled, but sometimes they can become a lot. Some days I get jittery from jumping between all my engagements, feeling weirdly unproductive. Like many things in life, even the things we love are best had in moderation.

I have gone through cycles where I began to have more and more days when I felt all over the place, and then the increasing of those days often led to burnouts. Burnouts were not fun, but on the bright side I learned from mine how to manage my many commitments in a way that best suits me. In fact, I’m still learning, always adjusting to make sure doing the things I love doesn’t become a stress without my knowing.

In this blog I will be going over 6 habits I started that have helped me avoid feeling scattered or unfocused while keeping up with my commitments. Some might be unsurprising but I intend to share how they affected me personally. Let’s begin.

1. Delay first exposure to social media and email every day

2. Follow the news less frequently

3. Set a daily highlight and put it on the schedule

4. Plan my week on Sundays

5. Find my prime time of day and use it well

6. Stay in tune with my capacity and avoid burnouts

1. Delay first exposure to social media and email every day

I wasn’t sure how much difference delaying social media exposure would make, but oh boy did it change things for me. I knew I was often starting my day by checking social media, but until I made this change I had no idea how much time it was robbing me of. On top of finding myself with extra time, I feel much more clear-minded throughout the day when I don’t start the day with anxiety from scrolling social media. The crazy part is this was so easy to start doing!

I did the same thing to personal email. Currently, unless I’m waiting for an important, time-sensitive email, I check it as late in the day as possible. In fact, to deepen the exercise, I designate 30 minutes each afternoon to sit down to deal with my personal email and now I rarely check it outside of this time.

After a while of doing this, I don’t find myself mindlessly clicking on the email app, and I can confidently say that my days go by more peacefully. Starting this habit not only helped me become more intentional about how I start my days, but also showed me how much additional stress my morning checkin was creating for the day ahead.

2. Follow the news less frequently

News is similar. I used to check the news almost every day and feel that if I didn’t, I would be missing out on what’s going on or I wouldn’t be caring about the world enough. However, reading the news every day won't change the world, and if something was huge enough I would most likely hear about it anyway.

Nowadays I give myself a block of time on Saturdays to catch up on the news and do any follow up actions, such as sharing, discussing with others, or researching more deeply into something. Inevitably there are times when I check the news or get exposed to it during the week, and that’s fine. I try to keep things flexible as long as I’m aware of how much I’m consuming so that I avoid feeling overwhelmed by it. Since I made this change, I have been feeling less anxiety in my day to day.

3. Set a daily highlight and put it on the schedule

This one also came from the book Make Time. The idea is to have one thing that I focus my energy on each day. By the end of the day, if I have the item done, it becomes my highlight of the day. I really like this one because the act of choosing a highlight forces me to prioritize clearly and the act of having a highlight helps me to work on something without having everything else stay on my mind.

This is particularly helpful when I have too many things to do. I find that once I decide what today’s highlight is, and I accomplish it, I don’t give myself a hard time for not doing other things because I know they will become highlight for another day. I have a bad habit of focusing on what I haven’t done rather than what I have, so this change also helped ensure I remember my accomplishments instead of forgetting right away and moving onto the next to-do.

4. Plan my week on Sundays

Every Sunday, usually before noon, I sit down for 15 to 30 minutes to write down one or two things I want to accomplish each day of the coming week. I don’t plan every hour of a day, because I had done it in the past and gotten super overwhelmed from micromanaging my calendar. My goal here is to put down a few key things that I want to target on getting done for the week, and start thinking about which day of the week might be best. Usually the bigger items on the list become my highlight during the week.

During the weekly planning session, I also look back on the previous week to see how many of the planned items were accomplished. Usually I have almost everything done so I don’t dwell on the ones that were not done. If I had a bad week (maybe only half of the items were done), I reflect on why and whether something could’ve been done differently.

5. Find my prime time of day and use it well

I try to find out what time of day I have the most energy and reserve that time for my most important work. This one goes nicely with the daily highlight, because I can then spend my prime time of day on the highlight, serving the purpose of spending my best hours on the most important work.

It can be tricky to figure out what my prime time is. I have noticed that I need additional energy right after work to transition out of my work brain and into something else, so I tend to find my most focused hour before work. That said, sometimes I wake up feeling quite low energy. On those days, as an alternative i look for time in that day when I have least distraction. Or I might decide it is actually a good day to take a break.

6. Stay in tune with my capacity and avoid burnouts

Speaking of breaks, I try to look to my body for signs I might be burning out. As someone who is almost always working on something, I have a tendency to not know I’m burning out until I’m already…well…burnt. After a few rounds of burning out, I learned to always be listening to myself in terms of how I’m doing both physically and mentally. I do this not only when I’m stressed, but also when I’m feeling totally okay. I try to have honest conversations with myself and learn the signals of my burnouts.

After this observation, a small exercise i started is I began putting down a color that represents how I feel as part of my daily journaling at the end of each day. It’s an easy addition to an existing routine that helped me be more aware of where I am. If I sense that I am close to a burnout, I try to get ahead and dodge it by scheduling in a break and resetting a little.

Conclusion

I found myself sticking to these habits after trying different things and gradually discovering what works well for me. Like the extensive list of tactics offered by Make Time, what works for me wouldn’t necessarily work for everyone else. The key is to not over-commit to one approach, to be flexible to change if something doesn’t work, and to remain patient knowing something will work.

After I naturally settled into these habits, I noticed I have more energy and time. Having additional time means I have room to fit in even more of what I like to do, or happily take a break. Overall, implementing these habits brought many improvements to my day-to-day life, helped me accomplish more both professionally and personally, and taught me how to better listen to my mind and body.

I imagine I will stick with these habits until they don’t work as well. When that happens, I will keep in mind to not get overly attached so I can try other approaches and let my habits evolve as I do.