Last week, I had added all kinds of details into my Todoist lists about when I was going to do stuff and it caused me a lot of stress.

Since I add everything from walking the dog to answering an email to my to do list, I have a lot of items on a given day.

Normally, that’s not stressful since I know that the number on my list does not mean I have umpteen urgent items to do.

However, once I put those items on my calendar with a fixed time, I felt very stressed.

I had that sense of ‘too much to do’ overwhelm – even though it was the same number of things.

It was saying that I had to do this specific thing at this specific time that was causing the stress.

That’s kind of weird considering that assigning a time to a task usually brings me some relief. (Once a time is assigned, then I don’t have to keep asking myself subconsciously when I am going to do the thing.)

I think it was having so many ‘appointments’ on one day that felt so overwhelming.

And by putting them on the calendar, I lost the sense of flexibility that makes Todoist work for me.

So now I am trying to think in terms of time blocking, scheduling certain types of tasks for specific times and then doing them in whichever order makes sense to me in that timeframe.

Hopefully that will be less stressful.