Only The Curious

I have a long and tangled history with over-commitment. Part of this comes from being what Barbara Sher calls a “scanner” – someone who has many interests and is constantly scanning the horizon for the next interesting thing. The other part of it comes from being an over-achiever, and feeling like I “should” participate in everything that I could, and do it all well.

I’m not going to go into great detail, because this post would be thousands of words long, but suffice it to say that I spent most of high school and college doing WAY too much. I may have had a good GPA and dozens of extracurricular activities on my resume, but I was also always sleep-deprived, prone to panic attacks, and in hindsight can say that I didn’t have nearly enough fun during those years. Eventually it caught up to me, and the wheels came off. I got too scattered, I lost a job and a boyfriend, I failed a class, and I realized that instead of accomplishing everything I wanted, I wasn’t actually accomplishing anything.

So I was forced to re-evaluate, and I came to the realization that I didn’t even WANT to be doing half of the stuff I was. And I was failing at the stuff I did want to do because I was spread so thin. So I quit everything and started to re-evaluate my life. Why was I doing all of this stuff? What exactly WAS I trying to accomplish? How do I avoid falling back into this trap in the future, as I have so many times before?

Avoiding over-commitment is important, particularly for we “scanners” and those whose MBTI types end with a “P.” Having a packed schedule can make us feel productive and important, and I’m no stranger to the adrenaline rush that comes with somehow pulling off everything in an insanely busy day. But there are a lot of problems with over commitment: stress, a lack of time for self-care, relationships and friendships can fall to the wayside, and ultimately it’s easy to lose direction and find yourself doing tons of things for no reason at all.

Over the past few years I’ve devised and honed several strategies for how to thoughtfully decide how and where to spend my time and energy, and I’m going to share them with you, one at a time, over the next several days, so stay tuned!

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