One thing that makes life more fulfilling is keeping things simple. To keep things simple means we are not overburdening ourselves with the worries and stresses of the day. We are not trying to do more than what we can handle, since we might end up burning ourselves out.
When I set a small list of things to do that are manageable (within a certain time frame, of course), it’s much more fulfilling after I’ve accomplished them rather than having a larger list and fulfilling each goal and feeling like I’m burned out, since I don’t want to do anything else afterward. We all know our limits, of what we can and can’t do, and how far we can push ourselves, but sometimes this invisible pressure to do more and accomplish more whispers in our ears as if we’re not doing enough.
And if we’re not doing enough, we can’t feel a sense of accomplishment when we do accomplish our goals. In fact, we’ll end up doing a thousand things while feeling like we haven’t done one. That’s what the “you can do more” or “that’s not enough” thoughts can do to us if we let them sink in our minds.
There’s a saying that less is more, and this is true in many ways. It’s not just about the quantity of goals we accomplish but the quality in which we go about accomplishing them. The less goals we have, the more quality in terms of thoroughness and detail we can put into them, since we have more time and energy to do so. Inversely, the more goals we have, the less quality they will bear, since we will have less time and energy to invest into each one.
Keeping things simple means keeping our goals to a minimum so that we can put more time and energy into them (not to mention, actually accomplishing them). There is a tremendous pressure when we’re trying to finish things in the nick of time, and even if we do, the result is a sense of relief, one that we wouldn’t want to experience each day, since it bears a feeling of “I barely made it” rather than “that was a job well done.”
Fallton Havenstonne 