I’m not the most organized person. This means that it’s a frequent occurrence for me to lose or misplace things. One of the ways I’ve learned to mitigate this is to keep spares of things that are much needed. Like car keys. I have my main set, a spare in my wallet, and the original stashed away where I attempt to never touch it and therefore never misplace it.
It can be stressful losing something and going through the process of looking for it. I’ve recently initiated a strategy for reducing stress by utilizing my spare key. If I lose my keys, I look for them for two minutes or so, depending on what I have going on. After two minutes I stop looking, stop worrying and use my spare. What ends up happening is that I find my keys later when I’m not trying to look for them. Doing things this way I manage to avoid a good amount of frustration and stress while saving time.
The most interesting aspect of this is the cross training that seems to be going on. The other day I had a number of tasks on my mind that needed to get done. It was stressful to think about them and would have been nice to get them out of the way. However, when critically strategizing I realized that one task would be best done in a day and a half, and the others would be best done in the proceeding two days. I could have gotten some of them done that day, but it would have been much more inconveniencing and therefore less efficient. “Great! I just won’t worry about any of this today and tomorrow”, I told myself. It’s not always the easiest thing to ignore something pressing and important until the exact moment it can best be dealt with, but this time I accomplished just that with much greater ease than usual.
Pondering my success, I realized that my newer method of dealing with lost car keys is actually practicing a similar form of compartmentalization. Both involve dispelling worrisome thoughts through trusting my overall sense of timing and strategy. I can’t help but assume that the little bits of practice I get from losing keys helped in my success in compartmentalizing days and tasks. After all, practice makes better.
Where are some places you find practice compartmentalizing? What’s some cross training you’ve been doing?