How to Feel Accomplished in 2020
Whenever you think about your most difficult tasks, always remember even the pyramids were made from grains of sand . Oh, and you don’t need another app — you need to get them done.
Since high-school, I have never believed my achievements were my own. For someone who had put in this little energy to be reaping impressive rewards, there had to be a glitch in the system, right? My imposter syndrome had waned in and out, not getting accepted into the degree programme I had coveted humbled me. The blow to my confidence made me realise I was only human at the end of the day and I moved through life trusting that I would attempt my best and call it a day, even if it meant accepting mediocrity. Then I actually began to enjoy my studies. I applied for a postgraduate degree and got accepted into both the programme and a prestigious fellowship.
Somehow, I started to feel as though my work was only ever going to be mediocre. It was as if my occasional scrolling through social media and Netflix (social ethnography into early adult neurosis I called it) somehow nullified the innumerable hours I spent pouring mental effort into my studies. I became fatigued, consumed by worries about starting tasks in case their outcomes would receive harsh criticism, because of a perceived lack of effort. So, I ended up in a rut. I spent my days nail-biting my way through colleagues texts about submissions, scrolling through social media feeds of friends wine-tasting, while I was rotting in the artificial lighting of the basement level in the library for the fourth Saturday this month.
It seemed that when I hit my Masters degree, my sprints of productivity scattered amongst days trying to recover from the mental chatter didn’t make me feel the same way they did in high-school or my Honours programme. I wasn’t reaping instant gratification in the way turning out an extra-curricular project or an all-nighter term paper would. I certainly wasn’t getting the most positive commentary, either. I knew I could perform at a higher standard, and I began to undertake intensifying tasks, knowing I lacked sufficient drive or strategy to get through them out of the anxiety anticipating negative feedback. The mountains of tasks that loomed on my desk weren’t so terrible. What drove me to the thought of giving everything up and becoming a monk was that the longer they sat untouched, the more tedious they appeared to be. With every project or task, I would find myself losing interest procrastinating and flitting onto another within a matter of days. Pondering over how to begin it, never moving past a few sentences of reading or writing
Even the smallest tasks started to weigh down on me. It took me weeks to work my way through the first volume of a series of monographs for my dissertation or even organise the literature for a paper I was drafting. Days would go by where I would achieve nothing — paralysed by the fear of failure and repulsed by tasks that had slipped from my curiosity.
I needed an action plan. I needed something that would rewire the reward-centres in my mind — with the primary requirement being an anxiety-proof plan of getting through tasks from the mundane to the mind-bending. It needed to be a method which didn’t require a timer or sessions of deep state work. The catch was that I would somehow need a system that kept my inattentive mind focused enough to get through the smallest elements of projects so I could feel as though my efforts were fruitful.
I started to form micro-deadlines, and instead of writing an entire term-paper in four hours I would give myself three minutes to write the heading, set up the page numbers, ten minutes to write the first sentence and so forth. These infinitesimal achievements all came without the imposed pressure of a timer ringing off and triggering my imposter syndrome-related anxiety because I didn’t adhere to the cruel chiming of my self-imposed toil.
Yet they had begun to add up, and I was ready to get through the mammoth tasks by giving myself the bare minimum to do in ample time to do it. I found myself making sustainable progress and taking breaks whenever I needed them instead of silencing my phone’s notifications, deleting social media, meditating for productivity and keeping my eyes fixed on the countdown of a Pomodoro awaiting release from my suffering.
The most convoluted tasks that would have taken months to dredge through converted themselves into micro-dosed spurts of dopamine in my reward centre because I felt like I was accomplishing something again. The Micro-deadline method has also been excellent for my self-esteem. Now whenever my work receives a compliment, or I’m selected to present my research, I’m not as quick to believe that I’m roaming through a nightmare where everyone else thinks I don’t deserve to be there. I can finally acknowledge that for whatever it is that I’ve completed I have worked hard (and exerted enough effort) and deserve to be where I am today.
