You Feel Behind Because Your Tabs Are Open

Failed or unfinished project number 477.

I started this basically failed blog in university.

It was called Trying to Tech, and I never made it past page or post number four, I think.

And it just became one more tab, one more open loop, one more project to add onto the pile that made me feel behind every single day.

This is Flint Mitchell from iAlign.

I went from stagnation, scrolling, overthinking, and feeling behind to a life of clear, consistent, confident action and freedom

This blog was supposed to be about technical topics that I was learning at the end of university.

I was building cool things like a electroencephalograph.

It’s reads brain waves or an electrocardiogram reads heart waves.

Or just learning small technical related subjects associated with my passions, which at the time was a combination of electrical engineering and human biology, the central nervous system, the brain, stuff like that

And these are subjects that I’m still incredibly fascinated by and continue to work in, in some form or fashion, though the arc around the journey is a little bit winding right now.

But unfortunately, this project, as you probably all too well know at this point in the story, became just another open loop, just another tab open next to the hundreds of other tabs that were on my computer or the articles that I wanted to save for later on different topics, projects I wanted to build, things I wanted to dive into, but obviously never did

And the main problem with this pattern is not just that it’s kinda disappointing to start things and not finish them.

The reality is when you continue to start many projects and not finish them, and then they become in paral- like I think, I think the open tab on your computer or the unclosed tab on your computer is actually a good, parallel or example, is the more of these tabs that open on your computer, the less space there is, the less memory there is on your computer for new tabs to open and get handled

At the end of the day, your computer or your central nervous system, your brain, can only handle so many things at the same time.

It can only put so many things into its memory at the same time

And so if you continue to start

Projects.

And a project can be anything.

A project can be books that you started reading that you only finished a couple pages of.

It could be, articles you you want to save for later on your computer.

It could be texts that you want to send, emails that you want to send.

Can’t believe I found Pachamama for 50% off at Safeway.

There must be something wrong with it.

Any of these small little loops count.

And if you add too many of them up, what ends up happening is that you get so many of them that accumulate over the course of a year they start to just become this unseen weight vest that you’re wearing all the time and then I would blink after a year or multiple years of starting so many projects like this blog and not finishing them.

And all of a sudden, I would feel like I had a million things that I had to do at any given time, but I wasn’t doing any of them.

So it became a self-image thing.

Not only was I behind, I felt behind, and then I started to feel like the type of person that could never not be behind.

Yet the reality is that the vast majority of these open loops, like this blog, or many of the books you start to read, or many of the people that you feel like you have to reach out to, it’s completely optional.

The reality was that each of these millions of open loops were just self-induced stress that was preventing me from, one, feeling good about myself, two, getting ahead, and three, knowing what I actually had to be doing, because if you prioritize everything, then you prioritize nothing, Because a priority inherently means that is an outlier of energy expenditure, and if you expend all your energy on everything, then there’s no outliers, and therefore you don’t prioritize anything

And at this point of the year, around September, is where these open loops start to accumulate to a point where they start to feel really heavy, especially if you never truly got rid of them from previous years.

But going into the end of the year when there’s so much spontaneous stress or chaos and travel, buying gifts, random spontaneous intense emotions that show up for whatever reason, they all compound on top of each other

And you end up feeling more stressed than you otherwise would have if you hadn’t had accumulated this massive amount of baggage of

Unnecessary, and optional commitments that are creating all this self-induced stress on top of everything else going on in your life

Because here’s the reality.

You don’t feel behind, because you’re doing too little

You feel behind because every abandoned project becomes another tab, another open loop.

And most of those loops are optional to begin with and completely unnecessary.

It’s not bad to start new things, But it is bad if you don’t clear them before the new year, otherwise your New Year’s resolutions just get buried with the old ones

Anyways, I’m Flint from iAlign.

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Cheers.