How to Be Human: Wake Up Thinking About Work

It’s never happened to me in a long time, but it did yesterday: I woke up from sleep at 4am thinking about work.
Thinking about some new tasks, the new marketing campaigns we were running, what were the best next actions to take, how can I make myself work through it faster, etc.
It used to happen a lot more often. I’d catch myself even thinking about work while I was doing leisure activity, like dinner with my family or during a gaming session. I go for weekly dance practices and I would think about when is the latest time I can leave practice to have an acceptable amount of sleep to prepare for work the next day.
Our brains never really stop thinking about a task that is still incomplete. Researchers have mentioned that this trait developed from prehistorical man; it would be highly detrimental to them if they stumbled upon something that they knew would aid them in their survival against their harsh environments, but didn’t act. While good for our ancestors, it’s not really that great for us trying to mindfully enjoy our precious little leisure time.
What works for me is I try to off-load all information-keeping processes onto an external platform. Paper, Todoist, Evernote, calendars, notebooks… I list them down. At the end of the day I do a little self-reflection on what is there to be done the next day, and what I’ve done today.
By trusting an external system that I am bound to look at every day, my brain can rest assured that whatever undone tasks will not be missed or forgotten.
Of course, it never really works 100% of the time… but if it did, I wouldn’t be human.
