Value your mental bandwidth
There is a reason why checklists and reminders are so popular, 4
As a student I used to frequently encounter this feeling of mental overload. The burden of storing this metadata about taking five technical courses, what I’m going to do for lunch, will I go out tonight or do my assignment, how will I travel home this weekend, and on, and on. This feeling of nausea due to information overload permeated my life in different ways. I would switch my study methods and sleeping routines on a termly basis, as I tried to find this global optimum of operating. But this did nothing to find said global optimum, it always left me in a new local optimum every four or five months.
The first step to combating this was acknowledging that this issue existed. Which wasn’t particularly difficult; my poor grades, physical health, and mental health, made that apparent after eight months of university. In later terms I was much better about this, though again, stuck in local optima which worked for as long as they did until they didn’t. Ultimately, I started putting this all down to me living as a student and just downing enough coffee to power through it.
In my head - life after university would be more optimized. Things would be orderly. This idea that I would stumble into my (or what I thought was my) global optimum is what I used to cope with as I traversed through these disorderly terms as a student.
It’s funny though, life has a way to keep you honest. Hold you accountable. In what way was I supposed to find this global optimum after having ingrained this habit of haphazardly navigating my life over five years?! As I transitioned into working full time, I quickly realized that things aren’t going to automatically work themselves out. This baggage that I used to carry as a student is still there, it’s just there disguised as work.
This is when I realized I have to take a step towards freeing up my mental bandwidth. I can’t be thinking of twenty different unrelated things at one instant. As I got responsibility over multiple projects, this became hell. We become so prone to attention deficiency through technology anyway, and this was just compounded by me wanting to store every relevant piece of information in my head at all times.
I’ve taken tens of courses studying computer science and learned the value of efficiently using memory, and I still couldn’t apply this to myself. I never made this connection beforehand, but instead of storing all this information in my active memory, why didn’t I dump it somewhere? Analogous to taking snapshots of databases at a cadence to prevent data loss, why didn’t I take such snapshots of my active memory, and then forget about them to free up space for the present information?
Thus, I started looking into using sticky notes on my computer. It started off as one sticky note, a bulleted list of things that I will need to revisit at some point in the future that my present self doesn’t need to occupy itself with. Later, it expanded to multiple notes on my desktop, of which I would periodically take screenshots in case they got deleted. This worked magically for me. I felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders. I had freed up my mental bandwidth. I could be creative with my time, I didn’t need to constantly have things in there which I attended to later. I could just… be, and cut out the noise.
There was a marked difference in my personality as well. I was less on edge, I was able to prolong conversations and fully dive into discussions. I stopped feeling like I was short of time, I felt the abundance of it. And this allowed me to do things more in the present. Not having to constantly worry about what’s on my mind was a relief, because I already looked after it by noting it down!
After some time, I found even this became a little cumbersome, as I needed to alt+tab into these stickies consciously every hour or so. And that itself started to occupy my mind. So I bought a set of physical sticky notes (4” x 6”), and used them instead of putting it on my computer. These are physically with me, on my desk, on my walls, on my monitor - and their omnipresence gives me the reassurance that these items will eventually be looked after.
I dug into this line of thinking, as I surely can’t have been the first one to have experienced this, and I found a related piece by Harvard. It states the following:
It’s been shown that using a simple checklist can help people like pilots, astronauts, and surgeons minimize errors that can mean the difference between life and death. But convincing smart and skilled people to actually use checklists can be challenging.
Not to say that mine or your checklists will make a life or death difference, but it goes to show the difference maker that they are.
We want to enable ourselves to perform at our best, and checklists contribute to this in two important ways.
Freeing up your mental bandwidth to focus on what’s present
Writing out steps so that you can use your knowledge productively
I haven’t gone deeply into the second point, but it’s a corollary to this piece which I personally haven’t explored but will do in due time. Here are some initial thoughts…
Things of repetitive nature, which I want to inculcate into my routine and ultimately turn into a habit can be put into a checklist as a step-by-step guide
Storing a checklist (virtually or physically) for how to do a task that I may have to do again, eliminating the need to revisit previous experiences or actively memorize them
Free up your mental bandwidth, and consciously optimize what’s in there, most of us underutilize this resource!
