Writing about this question.
I had some subconscious resistance to writing on CF for the past week. I wrote about it here:
To summarise, I talked about three main issues:
- Being overloaded with other work
- Identifying subconscious conflicts with new learning
- Subconscious irrational thinking
I’m talking about them very differently here than my linked post as my focus is on generalising the concepts.
I do not think there is anything special about me having them, I think these are problems a lot of people could have. I don’t think they’re specific to CF either, they could be universally useful conflicts to resolve.
I think being overloaded with other things is a very common issue. There are a few factors that could be at work.
- Bad time management. Lacking a good assessment of how much time one spends on activities and overbooking. I think this is a fairly basic skill anyone can learn though it does take some practise to make reasonable guesses at how long things take. Elliot wrote a good article that is related: Overreach Summary. It’s important to allow for buffer time in planning your schedule. I don’t think people often honestly assess how much time they spend doing stuff like socialising, playing games, shopping, doing chores, watching TV. If they did assess the time spent, they might reconsider how much they do it.
- People-pleasing. Agreeing to do things without thinking seriously about if time is available to do them. This is basically short-sighted second-handedness - choosing not to think things through seriously to get someone’s approval (and likely losing their approval later on by flaking on the agreement). People with this sort of problem could find it useful to learn about second-handedness and honesty. They may not realise that by behaving this way, other people think less of them and don’t plan to do things with them enthusiastically. They may have social circles that are very dishonest about annoying behaviour, so it might seem okay to do that, and trying to change their minds about that way of socialising could result in big changes in their lives which they find scary.
- Pleasure-seeking. Taking on tasks and activities thoughtlessly because they’re exciting and/or fun, and then not having time for things that are more important. People with this problem may have chosen “important” things that they don’t really want to do, or have a bad mindset about the “important” things. People with big commitments with work or children and who resent those responsibilities seem like they could easily make excuses to go pleasure-seeking. For commitments like work, which can sometimes be pretty easily abandoned, it may be worth re-assessing their career choices. For other commitments they may benefit from thinking more about the value those commitments have, how they can do them that is more enjoyable, and how they can be changed/how they can get help with the parts they resent.
Project notes
I’ve written quite a bit today already so I’m taking a break. I want to continue writing this another day before I consider my goal for the week met.
This issue is pretty closely related to why people leave CF and has a lot of overlap. I’d guess that someone who has reluctance or anxiety about posting on CF will leave if they don’t have a method for dealing with that reluctance or anxiety in a fairly short time span (within a few weeks at most).
The things I’ve written here are still pretty brief. They’re about some big issues that maybe I’ll come back to later to write about in more depth.