Strategies for Managing Tasks and Reducing Anxiety

Holly Trantham emphasizes that productivity should enhance life, not dominate it.

### The Totally Chill Guide to Tackling Life's Most Mentally Draining Tasks
* 📆  Setting recurring calendar reminders for tasks, from **weekly cleaning** to **annual bills**, can help ensure they get done.
* ⏰  Using the **two-minute rule** - if it takes 2 minutes or less, **do it now** - can prevent tasks from piling up.
* 🤖  AI platforms like ChatGPT can assist with research and task management, **reducing individual time spent on certain chores**.
* 🎁  Pairing an annoying task with a **small reward** can provide motivation.
* 🏠  Reworking how household tasks are divided can help alleviate the mental load, especially for those living with a **partner or family**.
* 🧹  Decluttering, organizing, and cleaning on separate days can make tasks feel **more manageable**.
* 📱  Hiding your phone from yourself during tasks can **reduce distractions and increase focus**.
* 🛑  Giving yourself permission to **deprioritize certain tasks** can help manage expectations and reduce stress.

hello everyone. I'm Holly Trantham, tfds creative director, and this is season two of The Totally Chill Guide to Work and Life. For the past eight years, I've been working behind the scenes on all of the content you see here on YouTube and across all of tf's channels, and I also wrote our second book, Beyond Getting By. Throughout this series, I'll be talking about how to approach your money and career decisions from a chill place where they help you live the life you want without ever becoming your sole focus. So let's be honest here, a lot of us have put off important money decisions longer than we should have. Money can be anxiety-inducing, especially if you never learned about it from your education or your family. But a lot of the time, we spend more energy worrying about doing something than it actually takes to just do it. And if you've been putting off getting started investing, just know that with Betterment, it is made easy. Just answer a few simple questions about your investing goals, timeline, and other factors, and

betterment will take it from there because with automated tools like portfolio rebalancing and dividend reinvestment. They make investing easy for you and a total grind for your money. Vment can help someone ease their way into investing as their financial experts are working behind the scenes to make your money hustle while you do literally anything else. Get started be invested. Click the link in our description or head to betterment.com tfd to sign up in minutes. Yes ma'ams I am coming to you with productivity content a quarter of the way through the 21st century. But I want to be clear here that I am generally against productivity for productivity sake. I think productivity especially in the workplace is only really necessary because lessening the amount of time and energy you spend on work means you have more of it left over for the parts of life that really truly matter. Not that work doesn't matter but you know what I mean. And when I say work of course I mean housework as well but even in a quest to

live a less productivity-focused life. There are still things we need to get done just to be people in the world. So, whether your most annoying task is something you've just continuously been putting off, like getting started investing or coordinating upcoming holiday plans with family (not to scare anyone), or something that just won't stop piling up, like your email inbox or your kitchen that somehow magically gets dirty again after you clean it, here are some simple ways to tackle your most mentally draining tasks. Number one: set recurring calendar reminders. So, I know I am a pretty type-A person, but for me, if I have something on my calendar, I'm pretty much going to do it. And not just for day-to-day stuff, I find this really important for things like annual bills, like our credit card bill, which is really easy to forget is coming if we don't set a reminder for it. Though I do know there are some budgeting apps that are actually pretty good about sending those reminders to you, I have gotten into the habit of setting reminders for

everything from recurring weekly ones to clean my apartment on Fridays to onetime reminders I set to cancel a subscription that I signed up for a free trial for, which actually brings me to my next point, number two: use the two-minute rule. This is a very basic rule that says that if something can be done in 2 minutes, do it right now. So, in the case of setting a reminder to cancel an app subscription that I signed up for a free trial for, I do that immediately when I download the app, so I just don't have to think about it. This is also the main rule that gets me to put away a pile of clothes in the evening, which just ends up piling up when I'm too lazy to hang up my outdoor clothes after I come inside and change into my indoor clothes. This dress-in-the-house situation is very rare. So many tasks take up way more brain space than they really deserve to because we spend so much time dreading the fact that we have to do them or thinking about, Oh

yeah, I got to do that rather than just doing them. That mental load is something so many of us deal with all the time, especially as women. And side note, I have been asked before how men in opposite-sex relationships can start taking some of that mental load off of their partner, and I think the key thing is just taking ownership of those tasks and taking it upon yourself to look up tips like these in order to figure out how you get them done. Number three, use chat GPT or another AI platform to help you break down larger tasks. Okay, I will not deny these AI tools still give me a little bit of the ick, and I'm not suggesting using them in place of real human labor, but I think they can be really helpful when they help someone cut down the time they personally spend on a task. So, when it's cutting down the time you would spend on something yourself, not necessarily something you would outsource to another human being, whether that's related to home chores or work, for instance, I totally see how helpful

they can be for doing a lot of research or tackling a bigger project. Down below, I've linked to an Atlantic article from last year, all about how AI like chat GPT can help you cut down the time you spend on domestic labor, even though it can't do your chores for you. For instance, one mom used chat GPT to research summer camp options for her kids that worked for their schedule, and it came up with a pretty good list. Even though it couldn't take on the hassle of actually driving her kids to camp, I tried out asking chat GPT to give me a meal plan that is high in protein and fiber, and it actually did a decent job giving me a basic outline for what that could look like. So, if things like researching meal plans for your family or finding things to do in your area bring you absolutely no joy, AI can be really helpful for taking the stress out of those tasks. Side note: I've also used it to help me figure out a room layout, and it actually worked pretty well. Number four: pair an annoying

task with a reward. We all love little treats, and sometimes a little treat is really good on its own, but you can also use them as motivation for doing something that you're really not looking forward to. According to an article in Psychology Today, in the 1960s, American psychologist David Primac developed a theory now known as the Prex Principle. He explained that doing something you're more likely to do can be a reward for doing something you don't actually want to do. And there have been several studies that have helped legitimize this idea behind reward pairing. A 2019 study found that it's not the reward itself, but rather how the reward makes people feel that helps them do their best. This makes sense because rewards boost our dopamine levels, which plays a key role in how our brains feel pleasure. Perhaps for you, this means only listening to a certain podcast that you love while working out or rewarding yourself with a pastry for doing your weekly bookkeeping. But of course, this only works if you

actually limit receiving that Award with doing the task you're dreading. Number five: rework how you divide labor in your household. In the first season of this series, I talked about the household management spreadsheet that my husband and I use to divide our tasks in the home. If there is one particular chore that you are constantly dreading, I would consider doing some chore swapping. If you spend more time dreading a task than it takes to actually do it, and you don't live alone, I would consider doing some chore swapping with your partner or roommate or family member, etc. For instance, I really hate mailing things, and there have been multiple times where I have kept something past the due date because I really dreaded going to The UPS Store to drop off the return package that much. I don't know why I dread that, but I really do. My husband does not feel that way; he's very neutral towards the mailboxes, etc. So now that is his task, and I have eliminated that from my life. Of course, that only really works if you

have someone who you are able to divide tasks with equitably, and also they are on board for doing that. But I do think you can find workarounds for avoiding the tasks you really dread, even if you live alone. For instance, one of the things I really dread about the mail is having to deal with missed packages. So if you're in the same boat, you could sign up for something like a PO box or use pickup points to ship packages to rather than dealing with them in your apartment building. Shout out to people who have package dealing problems in their lobbies. Number six, declutter, organize, and clean on different days. So I've gotten much better about this with age, at the ripe age of 32, but I am definitely a clutter-prone person, and I am also the person in charge of cleaning the apartment because I genuinely prefer to have one bigger weekly task to do rather than several daily tasks to do. But when I do my weekly cleans, if I have decluttering and tidying on the same

list with scrubbing the bathtubs and doing vacuuming. That list feels too long, so I've started making sure I do my decluttering and tidying a day before I do my big clean, so that big clean list does not feel overwhelming. Adopting a tidy-as-you-go mindset is also very important, which brings me to my next point, number seven: have systems in place for clutter. So, my very favorite tip for controlling clutter comes from Casey Davis's book How to Keep House While Drowning, which, if you are a member of the society at TFD, you will know was one of our book club picks. In that book, she suggests placing empty bins and baskets around your home so that you can easily and quickly tidy up places without having to put everything back where it goes immediately. Then, at the end of each day or week, when you reset your home, you can go around collecting all the things from your different bins and baskets and reorganize them and put back where they technically belong. I use this in the form of trinket dishes.

because I am someone who is constantly fiddling with her rings or taking her earrings off, so instead of maybe losing an earring, I just set it in a trinket dish when I want to take it off and come back around to it later. It goes back with all my jewelry, and we're all good. And there are probably other systems like that that you could pretty easily put into place, so you can stop making your own life harder. Number eight: hide your phone from yourself. So, for certain work tasks, I have to physically move my phone to another room in order to actually focus on them and not open the New York Times crossword app. I literally had to do that while writing this script. There are a lot of studies out there that illustrate how phone use leads to academic procrastination, but for those of us who are well beyond our school years, I'm sure we all know that that's still a thing, even if you're not studying. I've tried apps that lock me out of other apps or setting timers on

my phone for my social media, but truly sometimes I literally have to just physically move my phone because the only way I can actually get something done is to make it physically impossible for myself to procrastinate by scrolling. Number nine: give yourself permission to deprioritize. One of my very favorite books I've read in recent years is 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkman. Yet another book club pick, and this entire book is about dealing with the impossible task of trying to tackle everything our productivity-obsessed society is throwing at us. I highly recommend reading the entire thing, but here's a really good quote: The problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important, or for enough of what feels important, is that you definitely never will. The reason isn't that you haven't yet discovered the right time management tricks or supplied sufficient effort, or that you need to start getting up earlier, or that you're generally useless. It's that the underlying assumption is unwarranted. There's no

reason to believe you'll ever feel on top of things or make time for everything that matters simply by getting more done. This probably sounds like it's going to negate all the other things I've already talked about on this list, but I promise you it doesn't. Because there are always going to be things you do really have to get done. You have to file your taxes, sorry to say. You have to check in on your finances, and you have to make sure your house is clean enough. Those things are non-negotiables. But you don't necessarily need to have this week's meal plan written out on a chalkboard in your kitchen in perfect calligraphy. Relatedly, when I interviewed author Tiffany Dufu for the book, she talked about women and home control disease and how letting go of your home always being in perfect condition is a big step in creating a more equitable household. This honestly hurts me to admit as someone who lives and dies by her spreadsheets and Google Calendar, but there's really nothing magic about doing a certain

chore on a certain day of the week just because that's when you planned to do it. Sometimes, a fun and unexpected invitation or a long conversation with a friend on the phone can derail your plans to tackle your to-do list. But life has to have room for that as well, because what is the point of being productive and feeling on top of things if achieving that feeling means missing out on the parts of life that are truly so worth it? Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you back here next week on the next episode of the totally chill guide to work and life.

9 Ways To Trick Yourself Into Being More Organized

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The Financial Diet

The Totally Chill Guide to Work and Life: Season Two

Holly Trantham, the creative director of tfds, is launching season two of The Totally Chill Guide to Work and Life.

The series focuses on approaching money and career decisions in a relaxed manner, aiming to reduce anxiety around financial choices.

Betterment is highlighted as a tool to simplify investing, while Holly also shares tips for tackling mentally draining tasks, like setting recurring calendar reminders.

Tips for Managing Tasks and Reducing Mental Load

Using recurring and onetime reminders can help manage tasks effectively.

The two-minute rule encourages tackling quick tasks immediately to reduce mental clutter.

AI tools like ChatGPT can assist in breaking down larger tasks and researching options, ultimately saving time and reducing stress.

Using Rewards and Task Division to Overcome Dreaded Chores

Little treats can be effective motivators for tackling unpleasant tasks, a concept supported by David Primac's Prex Principle.

Studies show that it's the positive feelings from rewards, rather than the rewards themselves, that drive people to perform better.

Task swapping with a partner or using alternative methods for handling dreaded chores can also help alleviate the burden.

Tips for Managing Clutter and Procrastination

Adopting a tidy-as-you-go mindset and decluttering before a big clean can make the process feel less overwhelming.

Using empty bins and baskets around the home for quick tidying can help control clutter, with a weekly reset to reorganize items.

Physically moving your phone to another room can reduce procrastination, and giving yourself permission to deprioritize tasks can alleviate the pressure of trying to do everything.

The Balance Between Productivity and Life's Unexpected Moments

Feeling on top of things by simply getting more done is a common misconception, as some tasks are non-negotiable.

Letting go of the need for a perfectly clean home can create a more equitable household.

It's important to make room for life's unexpected moments, as they can be just as valuable as completing a to-do list.